Foreign Affairs
Related: About this forum'Despair is settling in': female suicides on rise in Taliban's Afghanistan
Source: The Guardian
Despair is settling in: female suicides on rise in Talibans Afghanistan
Unofficial figures point to a mental health crisis amid severe restrictions on Afghan womens lives
Zahra Nader and Zan Times reporters
Mon 28 Aug 2023 10.00 BST
First, her dreams of becoming a doctor were dashed by the Talibans ban on education. Then her family set up a forced marriage to her cousin, a heroin addict. Latifa* felt her future had been snatched away.
I had two options: to marry an addict and live a life of misery or take my own life, said the 18-year-old in a phone interview from her home in central Ghor province. I chose the latter.
It was not an isolated act of desperation. Since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, there has been a disturbing surge in the number of women taking their own lives or attempting to do so, data collected from public hospitals and mental health clinics across a third of Afghanistans provinces shows.
Taliban authorities have not published data on suicides and have barred health workers from sharing up-to-date statistics in multiple provinces, medics say. Health workers agreed to privately share figures for the year from August 2021 to August 2022 to highlight an urgent public health crisis. The data suggests Afghanistan has become one of very few countries worldwide where more women than men die by suicide.
-snip-
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/28/despair-is-settling-in-female-suicides-on-rise-in-talibans-afghanistan
Non-walled link: https://archive.li/0HDpK
Irish_Dem
(47,131 posts)For women, death is preferable to living under the Taliban.
Can there be some sort of international underground the these women?
Get them out of the country?
cilla4progress
(24,736 posts)She escaped to Canada instead of returning!
Irish_Dem
(47,131 posts)To save their lives.
I am glad your student got out.
cilla4progress
(24,736 posts)She has since graduated college and is getting married. She is trying to bring over the rest of her family.
Irish_Dem
(47,131 posts)Not like the rest of her family.
I hope she can get them out.
cilla4progress
(24,736 posts)A lot of pain for the ones left behind...
TSExile
(2,449 posts)The female populace of Afghanistan never getting a taste of freedom or getting it for 20 years only to have it cruelly taken away? My heart is always breaking for them. 💔