"Overwhelming feeling of hopelessness"

Christiane Fux studied journalism and psychology in Hamburg. The experienced medical editor has been writing magazine articles, news and factual texts on all conceivable health topics since 2001. In addition to her work for, Christiane Fux is also active in prose. Her first crime novel was published in 2012, and she also writes, designs and publishes her own crime plays.

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Suicide contradicts the very instinct of all living beings - the urge to survive. It is almost always depression that drives a person to such an act of desperation. The perceived hopelessness is not real: it is only the symptom of an illness that can be treated well. An expert interview.

Prof. Dr. Ulrich Hegerl

Prof. Dr. Ulrich Hegerl Senckenberg professorship at the University Psychiatry at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main and Chairman of the Board of the German Depression Aid Foundation.

Prof. Hegerl *, around 30 people in Germany commit suicide every day - most of them as a result of mental illness.

That's right. Most of them suffer from severe depression beforehand. The disease can create a feeling of hopelessness that is sometimes overwhelming. Suicide then appears to these people as the last resort.

This also applied to goalkeeper Robert Enke, whose death in 2009 caused sadness and sadness across the country. What did that do?

For the perception of depression, his death and the discussion about it have changed a lot in people's minds. Many prejudices have been broken down. We were able to show that in a study.

In 2009, around six months after Robert Enke's death, you asked volunteers about their attitudes towards depressed people.

People have seen that someone who is very successful and lives in a loving partnership can also fall into depression. You have understood: Depression is a disease that can affect anyone. In the first survey, 20 to 30 percent of those questioned considered depression to be a sign of personal weakness. A year later, only ten percent believed it. That is remarkable.

Before Enke's suicide, half of the respondents agreed to the claim that “a person should solve his problems alone, psychological counseling would be the last resort”. Has that changed too?

Yes, and even quite considerably! In the second survey, only about half as many saw it that way. It has become clear to many that depression is a dangerous disease. That they shouldn't be taken lightly. And above all, that this is not something you should deal with on your own, but with which you need professional help - as well as appendicitis or a heart attack.

After the intentional crash of the German Wings machine in April - do you fear that the mood towards people with depression could have changed again?

Unfortunately, that is not entirely unlikely. This is a big problem for people suffering from depression. Such events can reduce the willingness to seek help again. Dealing with the disease openly, getting out of isolation, is much more difficult if you have to fear being labeled because of it.

We have received a lot of worried feedback from those affected via our Facebook account. They are afraid of being viewed as dangerous to the public with a diagnosis of depression.

In fact, some politicians have even called for people with depression to be banned from working in some areas.

Apparently they believed they were meeting popular opinion. However, these voices quickly fell silent again. I think they underestimated how many people are affected by depression. That's almost one in ten! Then there are the relatives - that's three times as many. All of them were pretty alienated with such statements.

Back to the subject of suicide. Basically it contradicts the very instinct of all living beings, the instinct for survival.

In fact, humans are the only living things that commit suicide. Lemmings don't throw themselves off cliffs either because they want to kill themselves. In a mentally healthy state, it hardly ever occurs in humans.

Not even in a moment of great despair, as a spontaneous act? I am thinking of the great stock market crash of 1929. Some people who had lost everything threw themselves out of the window.

It is unclear whether these unfortunate people actually suffered from depression. If someone is depressed and gets into financial hardship, then this is the reason for their hopelessness. If there are no financial problems, he will look for something else. It is not the specific problem that caused the depression. Something like this happens much less often than you might think.

What about serious illnesses - Alzheimer's disease, for example, or incurable cancer? Are these reasons why people take their own lives?

For a corresponding study, one has looked through millions of family doctor files. Around 900 patients had committed suicide. You then looked at how many of these people had previously suffered from severe physical illness. This was true for 37 percent - little more than in a non-suicidal control group. It was 36 percent! This even applied to cancer: 3.6 percent of the suicide cases had cancer. In the control group it was 3.2 percent. Of course, it seems reasonable to assume that someone is killing themselves because they have been diagnosed with cancer. But that's just not true - the truth is, it's depression.

For a mentally healthy person it is hardly understandable that one voluntarily ends one's life without having a valid reason.

Exactly, you are always looking for an explanation - and if you look, you will find one. But in reality, it is almost always a mental illness that leads someone into suicide. This is a tragedy - because depression can actually be treated very well.

Have you ever toyed with the idea of ​​killing yourself? Find help, for example from your family doctor. You can also get anonymous advice on the Germany-wide Depression information hotline: 0800 33 44 5 33 or at www.diskussionsforum-depression.de.

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