Today I gave a Infoblender talk to the Departamento de Informatica.

While preparing for the talk, I did a cursory search and was surprised to find suicide in Portugal is as bad as in the US, if not worse. Since last year, it’s everywhere in the news that suicide rate in the US increased 40 percent in the past decade. Billions of dollars of funds have been allocated for research and community outreach. The health system has call it a national crisis. In about the same time frame, the suicide rate in Portugal raised 87% with no one notice. And that’s just the official numbers. For various reasons, studies have shown that suicide cases in Portugal were severely under-reported, often as a ‘controversial case’ instead of a ‘suicide case’ in the medical record. I guess people were not talking about it because of traditional or cultural reasons. My host Rui came to campus to attend my talk. Rui commented on that there were indeed cases as all the accidents that caused train delays. Rui lives in Braga but commute to Porto daily for his administrative work at the INESCTEC.

In other words, suicide situation in Portugal is a ticking political bomb.

In the Q&A session, we spent time to discuss how we may extend the collaborations beyond the Fulbright term.

I mentioned my talk to a forth year PhD student I knew. She was reluctant to go because she saw some senior faculty attended.