Lucia, 34 years old and six suicide attempts: “Now I want to live”

Her name is not Lucía, but she would have loved it and that will be her name for this interview. It is not the only thing that this 34-year-old woman would have liked to change in her life, who has tried to take her own life up to six times, the last one five months ago, but now she wants to live. It all started very early. “Since I can remember I have suffered,” says Lucía. She refers to a family environment of violence that marked her entire childhood. “I lived in great fear, I was very scared,” she explains to NIUS. She was so terrified that she was only 15 years old and wanted to put an end to that situation and she chose a box of rat poison as the way out. A relative who saw her forced her to vomit, but nothing more. That was covered without questions, or therapies, or doctors. Thus, the years passed in silence. “I never told anyone,” Lucia confesses, and that only made it worse. “I had a very great feeling of loneliness not being able to share my pain, but I was afraid to tell it.” She now recognizes that it was a mistake and that she should have told someone. At the age of 18, Lucía left home, but she kept reliving over and over again everything that had happened. She had post-traumatic stress. “It was as if I was still there, flashbacks came to me,” she tells us, “it was as if she were a child again, she lived more in the past than in the present.” And that the present was almost perfect. She has a degree, with a stable job and a good salary. No one could suspect what was going on inside Lucia until she burst out, “It was like calm water…she seemed clean, but as soon as she moved all the way down she came out.” The water was cloudy with memories of her from her childhood. And it wasn’t from time to time, it was several times every day. She wanted to end her suffering and she tried again through suicide. Her academic training gave her the necessary knowledge to do so and she took several pills. However, her reaction made her vomit and thanks to that she once again saved her life. Six suicide attempts Two years ago, air was injected into a vein with a syringe. She didn’t get it either. And meanwhile her memories of her childhood kept visiting her in the form of nightmares to the point that she often passed out. “It was a way of escaping,” explained a psychologist to whom she went, but she couldn’t help her “because I didn’t accept what she told me.” Life went on well for Lucía. She became a partner, the job was still stable and the salary just as good. But inside she was still broken. In April she left home and went to a hotel. “I didn’t want to do it in front of my partner,” she confesses. She cut her wrists and seeing that she didn’t work she tried to throw herself out of the sixth floor window. But the police, notified by her partner, stopped her by holding her by the shoulder at the last moment. After that, she spent five weeks in psychiatry and a further time in a private center. “I only thought about dying and about ways to die, I lived without hope,” says Lucía. It was her partner who said enough is enough and took her to Seville guided by a press article in which the psychiatrist Álvaro Moleón spoke about an innovative therapy to treat some pathologies such as Lucía’s.Psychiatrist Álvaro Moleón.NIUSAn innovative therapy”Do something, please “. With that phrase Lucía entered Álvaro’s clinic, where her story has begun to change. “We apply the Seville protocol,” says Dr. Moleón. It refers to an accelerated protocol of deep transcranial magnetic stimulation. A neurostimulation technique in which, through the release of magnetic pulses in certain brain areas, specific for each pathology, it is possible to stimulate neuronal circuits that function aberrantly in the patient.”The treatment carried out with the Magventure X100 is scientifically endorsed in Europe and America”, explains Álvaro, “and is used to treat persistent depression, with or without anxiety, OCD and addictions”. In the case of Lucía, it was applied intensively for three weeks, she received between three and four daily sessions, three consecutive days, “when the normal is one per day”. The results have surprised Álvaro himself. “On the Hamilton depression scale that we psychiatrists use to assess it, it has gone from 18 to 4 points.” The remission is repeated in the anxiety scale where it has gone from 29 to 10 points. It is not the only case. Álvaro has applied the Seville protocol to five patients and the results have always been positive. Lucia claims to feel better. “I don’t feel like dying anymore, I don’t think about it and the sadness and apathy have diminished,” she tells us. She still has flashbacks but they are less frequent and she deals with them in a very different way. “I am now in a life that I like, in a life that I want…”, says Lucía, although she knows that life has not changed… what has changed is the way she sees it.