A failure for mental health
The Falla Periodista Gil Sumbiela has the collaboration of the Valencian Community Mental Health Federation to make depression visible.
The Falla Journalist Gil Sumbiela dedicates his monument 2023 to the depression. On March 16, the president of the Valencian Community Mental Health Federation, Rosa Bayarri, came to visit the monument to this fault, located in the Benicalap neighborhood, in Valencia. Bayarri showed his gratitude to this commission “its sensitivity, for making the invisible visible and for counting on the associative movement of people with mental health problems and their families to raise awareness about this type of problem in a responsible way”.
under the motto ‘Touched… but not drowned’, the fallero artist Fer Marzo gives visibility to this mental health problem, which is already the leading cause of disability worldwide. Some posters prepared by the Valencian Community Mental Health Federation have been placed around the fault with key messages for the Valencian Community Mental Health associative movement.
As the federation recalls, it is estimated that two hundred and eighty million people have depression worldwide and two million people in Spain. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), depression is the leading cause of disability in young people and adults. In addition, one in five people in the ER are affected by depression and/or anxiety and the frequency of depression in the adult population is more than double in women (7.22%) than in men (3.23%).
Monument data 2023
Under the script, signed by Marta Marzo, this year’s Falla by Journalist Gil Subiela aims to value the following:
“Today, people silently fight a thousand battles. Battles that, generation after generation, have been despised and minimized. Battles tough enough that sometimes we can’t fight alone. Mental health is being taken care of more and more, but we still have many things to do about it. Because people are not always prepared to assimilate reality.
Sometimes sadness surrounds us. It even has the shape of a shark and it seems that it is circling around us, waiting for its opportunity to eat us. The worst thing is that we cannot always understand it and, little by little, it takes over us.
That sadness can have many reasons, such as heartbreak. It’s not easy to accept that a relationship has broken up, for whatever reason, and get used to being alone again. Breaking up any relationship is very painful.
Nor is it easy to try to push away that sadness while you have to accept a harmful change in your body. Illnesses always come at bad times and stick into our pockets to make it harder for us to move forward.
The employment situation does not help in all this reality, and it is that many times we find ourselves closed in jobs that consume us and that take away our time to be able to spend it with the people we value the most.
Society has tied us so much to the workplace that even saying goodbye to it seems like a world to us. Many people find themselves lost with their retirement and stop finding meaning in life.
All layoffs are difficult, but nothing is more difficult than saying goodbye to the people we love the most. It is true that no one lives forever, but it is also true that we are never fully prepared for that moment. Nobody. Neither the person who leaves, nor those who stay.
It is not easy to navigate in all those waters, like pirates dodging the danger of the sea. But one thing is clear, that we have to continue fighting. Because we can be touched but we can never sink.”
