There are a few types of Facebook statuses that annoy the hell out of me:
A recent study suggests that the rate of suicide attempts amongst women in Afghanistan is on the rise. Reportedly, over 2,300 Afghan women between the ages of 15-40 try to take their own lives annually. This is staggering compared to previous decades, but it’s hardly surprising as to why these days.
It’s apparent that women in Afghanistan face many hardships: arranged marriages at extremely young ages, poverty, domestic violence, having little to no rights, lack of health care, and the harsh and gruesome reality of war. On top of that, it is frowned upon for these individuals to seek help when suffering from mental illness, which deters many Afghan women suffering from severe depression from seeking treatment.
Sadly, most reported attempts are of self-immolation, suicide by fire. So Along with the emotional scars of attempted suicide these women have physical proof as well.
Phoebe Prince’s suicide last January shocked the nation. Prince was not the first teenager to commit suicide (and will sadly not be the last), but her story was noteworthy for the allegations that bullying by her classmates at a Massachusetts high school drove her to it. Now, a lawyer for several of the teens accused of harassing Prince to death is arguing that she suffered from mental illness and that this was the true cause of her decision to kill herself.
“They say that without the name-calling … Miss Prince would not have killed herself. But before Miss Prince’s unfortunate and tragic death, she had a history fraught with problems,” a lawyer for Sharon Chanon Velazquez, 17, who is accused of tormenting Prince, says in court newly filed documents. “She had been diagnosed and treated for mental health issues before [Velasquez] had any interactions with her.”
You know, medical records or not, it’s evident that Phoebe Prince had some pretty serious problems. Anyone that would commit suicide has, at the very least, the lack of an effective coping mechanism (and sometimes that inability to cope is temporary … but sadly too late). That said, though, there’s this expression about a straw and a camel’s back, and it’s an adage I happen to agree with. Those on the outside will never know the straw that turned Ted Bundy into a psychopathic killer of women … or Osama bin Laden into the most notorious terrorist of all time … or Lindsay Lohan to start drinking before she was a teenager.
In Phoebe Prince’s case, that straw is obviously the cruelty she suffered at the hands of her classmates.
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