Hero without cape! Last Thursday, February 9, a firefighter from Tenerife saved his life by managing to convince a man not to jump into the void from a bridge that connects Tejina with Bajamar, within the municipality of San Cristobal de La Laguna.
“He talked to him for an hour and a half and managed to convince him not to jump into the void,” according to the Tenerife Firefighters who wanted to congratulate his partner Jhoni.
Members of the Tenerife Fire Consortium itself traveled to the place, whose members collaborated with the Local Police, National Police and Canary Emergency Service (SUCC).
the quietest death
Every two days a person decides to end their life in Canary Islands as a result of a chronic anguish that nobody and nothing seems to be able to solve. The suicide rate in the Canary Islands is one of the highest in Spain. And although there are many reasons that can lead someone to end their suffering through suicide, there are several conditions in the Islands that favor it. The high rates of psevere poverty (16.8%) and unemployment (which today are 17.7% but have been above 25%), They have been and are a breeding ground of uncertainty, anxiety, depression and addictions that, in the long term and without adequate care, produce a deep despair from which there seems to be no other way out than death.
A total of 208 people in the Canary Islands committed suicide in 2020, thus consolidating a worrying trend that places the Archipelago as the third community in which more acts of this type take place. Suicides have not stopped growing since they began to be registered back in 1980 in the Islands. Although the data from that time are less reliable than the current ones, the deaths considered as suicide barely exceeded one hundred. In 2007 –which is when Spain standardized the statistical calculation of this social problem based on international criteria–, the number of suicides rose to 157, that is, 7.7 people per 100,000 inhabitants. Today that same rate rises to 9.56 per 100,000 inhabitants.
Although the numbers fluctuate each year, there are key moments in which the consummated acts are increased. The economic crash of 2008 was one of these aggravating circumstances. That year, suicides grew by 16% in the Islands, registering 183 deaths for this reason. In 2012, after a harsh policy of cuts was implemented throughout the country, suicides in the Islands rose 33% in one year. At the time the pandemic broke out coronavirus, suicides in the Islands grew by 5.5% and marked, in turn, a record in the historical series. It remains to be seen how the economic crisis after the covid has influenced this trend during 2021 and 2022. But according to the clinicians themselves, the situation is far from improving.
