“On Suicide” is a profound documentary study on the phenomenon of SUICIDE. It pursues an in-depth analysis of the reasons for the problem’s expansion on the globe, asking the why’s for its growing frequency in Bulgaria and worldwide.
Why do we think it was important to make and show this film?
Because suicide has never been treated as a special kind of phenomenon. Not even by the scientific disciplines that deal with it professionally. Psychiatry and psychology hardly touch on it on the very surface: as a natural outcome of certain mental disorders. Sociology prefers staying with numbers, never coming near the human personality. Paradoxically, the deepest problems of the human soul, human soul as a concept, is no subject to any science.
Our film faces that dreadful phenomenon with a complete and multi-aspect awareness and raises the full spectrum of hard questions that would eventually lead to a more responsible attitude towards it.
The information issue is to be the first step. Even statistical data, to begin with, is hardly known by the public. And most of that data speaks eloquently for itself. Research indicates a stable tendency of increasing growth of suicide rates worldwide. Now over ten million people on the globe attempt to end up their lives annually, around one million of them successfully! It practically means one death every 40 seconds!
Our film points out that suicide is not determined by an isolated psychological condition. It is a socially determined spiritual phenomenon. Suicide is a product of modern civilization more than of anything else, and, in a sad way, more than anything else is. And it is not an exception anymore. “On Suicide” is an appeal for spiritual revival, an SOS for preservation of the core humanity. It is an outcry against the philistine materialistic inclination of the civilization that oppresses the spirit. Suicide is not pathology nowadays, just on the contrary: it is a logical outcome of the spiritual hopelessness that modern people normally live in. It is the agonizing scream of the dying human spirit suffocated by shortage of cultural oxygen. The huge majority of modern men live in a perpetual chronic suicide mode. Suicide threatens to become a constant and normal condition of the human soul! The greater part of people are actually heading towards a formal suicide, although far not all of them – thank God! – reach it factually… Dissatisfaction, disappointment and/or anger against life have become a natural state of the “homo neuroticus”, as some psychologists describe modern man. Homo suicidum is a name that we consider no less relevant to the human species today. A common spiritual feature of that newly-evolved quasi-human mutant is the lack of an ideal…
Our film is meant not so much to solve the problem, but rather to raise a loud alarm that there exists such a menace and that it is an extremely serious one. An alarm that we have never heard so far, anywhere. The suicidal menace is a growing threat that highly overmatches the social level – it is a direct assault against the core of Life itself on a highest existential level. Its causes are rooted very deep down into the spiritual foundations of modern mankind. It is the most vigorous, the most horrifying denial of Life that could possibly exist. Suicide is a life-destroying force much more powerful and efficient than homicide – both quantitatively (the number of suicides exceeds almost by two that of homicides!), and qualitatively (as it threatens life from deep within, rather than from the outside). “On Suicide” will have completed its mission if it succeeds in raising enough deep, scary, essential questions that very few people dare ask themselves. Questions that would help each person in need reach the core of that problem within themselves and to find their right personal solution.
The film is a good pretext to take a general shot on the current spiritual state of mankind.