There are news stories that are not read, but experienced. This is one of them.
Monday afternoon, Ilioupoli . Two seventeen-year-old girls climb together onto the roof of a six-story apartment building. They lock the door behind them. And fall into the void, holding hands . One lost her life. The other is hospitalized intubated in the Intensive Care Unit of the KAT with extensive cerebral hemorrhage and multiple fractures, in a condition that doctors describe as extremely critical .
At the Asklepieion hospital in Voula, where both were initially taken, doctors struggled for over an hour to bring the girl back from the dead. They failed. The hospital’s director, Emilios Vougiouklakis , announced her death in words that reflected the anguish of everyone there: “despite continuous and intensive efforts that lasted over an hour, unfortunately, she was unable to come back.”
Behind this tragedy lies a letter. It was left by one of the two, addressed to her parents. In a few lines, a seventeen-year-old child described three years of depression that no one saw or did not have time to see. She wrote about a world that “is no longer for me” , about fear of the Panhellenic Exams , about a life from which she could no longer find anything to keep her upright.
This letter is not simply the testimony of a personal anguish. It is a mirror of a generation that lives under pressure that we often do not recognize as such. The phobia of failing exams , the feeling that your value is measured in grades and professional prospects , the isolation in pain are not pathologies of individual cases. They are a symptom of a society that has not yet learned to listen to its children before they reach extremes.
The question that remains — and one that has no easy answer — is how many other children carry a similar burden without saying it. How many write letters that never leave them. How many simply need someone to ask, ” How are you really? ” and wait to hear the true answer.
The Panhellenic Exams start in a few weeks. Thousands of young people across Greece are currently in the exact same situation full of pressure, fear and uncertainty. The tragedy in Ilioupoli is not the time for statistics and analysis. It is the time to talk to our children . To tell them that no grade, no exam result, no failure is worth as much as their lives .
If you or someone close to you needs support, the Psychological Support Line 10306 of the Hellenic Psychological Service operates daily. The Help Line for Children and Adolescents 1056 is also available 24 hours a day.
