with 12 years Verónica threw up every morning from her anxiety before going to school. They started bullying him when he was 9 and nearly killed him in his second year at ESO. “One day he stopped getting out of bed. He didn’t want to go to class. Didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, didn’t washHe didn’t want to see anyone or leave his room. I cried and listened to music. Even her hair started to fall out due to the lack of iron,” explains her mother, María.
Both are fictitious names because they prefer to remain anonymous. But the thing is real. It is the story of a young woman from Mislata. tyranny led to self-harm and attempt suicide. This is similar to the case published by the Prensa Ibérica group Levante-EMV after an institute board resigned due to “Negligence in education” to treat 15 suicidal children.
Verónica’s nightmare began in the third grade when some girls insulted and harassed her in the schoolyard. “The center did not offer me any solution, everything continued the same or worse.. If we had intervened soon, it wouldn’t have ended like this,” María laments.
Those girls pushed Verónica until she was left alone in the classroom without any friends. However he never wanted to change schools because he was more afraid of being rejected again, says her mother. They went to the center’s psychologist, but he didn’t help either. “They’re worried about following their protocol and they’re doing this job, but it hasn’t helped my daughter improve,” says María.
In high school, the bullying continued as she moved to the girls class who bullied her. “There it is strong insults and in front of more peopleThey called her a prostitute and worse things,” explains María. Eventually she started going down on the porch by herself and more classmates harassed her. She endured the entire first year of ESO with great difficulty, while the center counsel “didn’t help”, she says.
“Mom, I don’t want to go to school”
In the second year of ESO, Verónica stopped sleeping. “She was so worried she couldn’t sleep and woke up so tired she couldn’t continue class,” she says. It was when she started vomiting most mornings out of sheer anxiety about going to class. the days i went suffered a loss of consciousness. He finally stopped coming. “There was a day when she said, ‘Mom, I don’t want to get out of bed,’” says María.
He hasn’t set foot in high school for a quarter, and his high school guidance counselor hasn’t helped either. “She locked herself in the room to cry. She isolated herself. She didn’t want to eat or drink with friends, didn’t sleep, didn’t wash,” says her mother. Even at that time, he experienced very cruel events. “Once, a few kids said they wanted to meet him to play. After a long time. she got excited, she cleaned up, she got dressed and she was so excited. What they do is ring the bell and going down to escape“She remembers her mother.
Verónica was still locked in her room and was refusing to eat, so María took her to the pediatrician. “When she saw him, she referred him to the Aldaia Mental Health Unit, where he began seeing and consuming a psychologist and psychiatrist. anxiolytics and pills depression with 12 years“.
The young woman started to raise her head and came to celebrate her birthday with her family. “But on March 16, the epidemic came. He was happy at first but eventually went back to jail,” María accuses. Diagnosed picture of social phobia and depression and anxiety. But he stopped taking the drug.
In December 2020, at the age of 13, he attempted suicide, leaving behind a four-page farewell note. He went to Manises hospital and then to La Fe. Later, his mother discovered that he had been writing down his ideas in a diary for some time. There were words like ‘everyone hurts me’ or ‘I’ve never felt so bad’When I read it, the world fell on me and I didn’t know what to do anymore,” says her mother, who was 8 months pregnant at the time.
“No one cares about families”
María used her maternity leave to take care of Verónica, then she quit her job and took advantage of unemployment, then a subsidy… “Nobody’s thinking about families. I couldn’t work with my daughter like that, I couldn’t leave her alone in danger of doing something crazy.“It’s true that they’re very focused on the mental health issue, but how are you going to feed it if you stop working to take care of it?” He received subsidies from social services and had to throw away his savings.
In one of these processes, “the whole family suffers a lot.” “Even his siblings became so isolated that he even distanced himself from them,” says his mother. “Support must be 24 hours. Many days I would get up at 3 am just to check if he was in his room, always with terrible anxiety,” she recalls.
Fortunately, Veronica’s story has a happy ending. A public health psychiatrist who visits him every week contacted him. She is now 16 years old and still isolated, albeit less and less every day. “I convinced him to go to the gym for a few days and he had friends again and now he’s preparing for exams to get into middle class and study again.”
Despite everything, Jana can’t help but think about it. almost irreparable damage what would have happened if he had realized it quickly in the third grade towards his daughter. “They didn’t listen to me at school, and the counselors don’t help you. You need people who know it’s a matter of life and death because my daughter didn’t make it, but then you see it on the news. The jumping Terrasa boy and girl or the other kids who took their own life and she has no right,” says María.
The mother even offers to help parents who are starting to experience this situation. “There are many problems that happen to children that parents don’t realize. We must learn to see them too, because otherwise this generation may leave us,” she says.