Speech on Mental Illness and Suicide

Mental Illness and Suicide

            Not everyone understands how it feels like to have a mental illness. Only people with mental disorders who understand each other. The source cause of this problem can be from inside and outside. Perhaps many of you think mental illness sufferers are loners, but in reality the sufferers have many friends around them. Therefore, the problem is not always in the sufferer. The common causes of mental disorders are genetic, biological, psychological, and environmental. Environmental factor has the greatest role. From inside the house, a ruined family makes the children stressed or domestic violence that ultimately affects the child's psychological health. From outside the house, people at school as well as in the work put pressure on the sufferer's mental, or worse, people alienate the sufferers. If person is very desperate about his life, this may lead to a dangerous and rather extreme decision that person can make. The decision I mean is suicide.

            Ladies and gentlemen, the main causes of someone wanting to commit suicide are depression, impulsiveness, social problems, philosophy of death, and other mental illness. We can see that one of the main cause is depression. Based on the results of Basic Health Research by the Ministry of Health in 2013, the prevalence of emotional mental disorders shown with symptoms of depression and anxiety for the age of 15 years and above reached about 14 million people or 6% of the total population of Indonesia. Depression is dangerous because it is a kind of mental illness. It can lead someone to commit suicide. Based on data from Police Headquarters of the Republic of Indonesia recorded there are 921 suicide cases in 2013. Suicide is one serious case that is often forgotten. Someone who has suicidal intentions already shows some signs and symptoms that can be observed by people closest to him. Unfortunately, many people ignore this with the excuse of 'maybe just a little lost', or underestimate with the thought of 'no possibility of suicide' until finally it is all too late. This is the problem of people around mental illness sufferers who have the thought about suicide which is the ignorance, so we must eliminate this trait. We have the obligation to save lives, and everyone do. And all you need to do if your relative is experiencing suicidal signs is to seek professional help by visiting a therapist, gather him around positive and supportive people, be a good listener, and do not argue about death or suicide. People who are having severe problems tend not to think rationally, so keep their spirit up.

            Ladies and gentlemen. Les Gray, a psychologist from New Zealand, said that even if our silence on suicide is guised with good intentions which are hiding our fear of death, resulting in a reluctance to speak openly about it. The extremely high rate of our youth suicide relative to other comparable societies is surely sufficient proof that our current approach which is silence treatment is a spectacular failure. Therefore, let us give hope to suicidal person because there is a saying “once you choose hope, anything's possible”. For those suicidal persons out there, when you get into a tight place and everything goes against you till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn. And for the last, a single thread of hope is still a very powerful thing.

Author:

Arum Ratnaning Ratri

2211416050

English Literature 2016

Universitas Negeri Semarang

For subject:

Speaking for General Purposes (403)