Victo, Jose Antonio B.

A – 131

Good evening ma'am and good evening classmates, The topic for my speech today was not my

first topic. I had an outline finished. I sat down at my computer one night to prepare my speech,

right after I watched some YouTube Video. That’s when I came across a video that moved me. It

moved me so much that I changed my speech topic. The title of the video was “Please don’t kill

yourself”. The video struck a chord with me because I have friends who are suicidal. This is why

I chose suicide as my speech topic.

According to World Health Organization approximately one million people die from suicide each

year, which represents one death every 40 seconds. Suicide is the act of taking one’s own life and

it’s one of the most leading cause of death especially to minority, and that is very alarming to

everyone. If we will observe the social media, there are a lot of posts that talks about young people

who committed suicide, mostly are students. But what are the leading factors why they choose to

take their own life?

First is academic struggles, students are loaded with school works that sometimes affect their

mental health which results to depression. Also, people around them may affect them especially

their parents. If a student did his best and yet results were failures, we tend to overthink and

question ourselves “Is my best still not enough?” and the sad reality, when we came home all we

hear from our parents after knowing that we got failing scores are their disappointments and
pointing out that you are a big mistake to the family. Next is, family problems, this a big contributor

to attempt suicide because they are the one you need in your life and your number one support

system, if they are not in good terms, if they fight every night when you came home from a tired

day, maybe you’ll think that someday they will be in good terms if you lose your life. We think

that to stop the severe sadness, disappointments, failures and to stop hurting, we decide to take our

own life. However, it is not too late to raise awareness about this issue, it is not too late to be a

friend to people who experience suicidal thoughts, it is not too late to take an action, that’s why

there are four words here, gift, skills, love and hope. We are all gifts from Him, we are His children

and He gave us skills, special skills or talents that we can use to help other people. Love, which is

the greatest thing on Earth, if we love one another, no one will feel alone and lastly, hope, we

should always look at the brighter side that no matter how hard it is to survive our life, let’s have

hope that everything that is happening is God’s plan.

Before I end up my talk, I will leave this quote of Tadashi from Big Hero 6 “I’m not giving up on

you, you don’t understand this yet, but people need you.” This became effective because Tadashi

is not just talking to Hiro but he talks to the audience. This could help someone who is going

through a tough time, if a person would feel loved, needed and that other people will not give up

on him or her. Let us all be aware of the people around us, let us all be gentle to one another

because everyone is on war.