'Despair is settling in': female suicides on rise in Taliban's Afghanistan

Source: The Guardian

‘Despair is settling in’: female suicides on rise in Taliban’s Afghanistan

Unofficial figures point to a mental health crisis amid severe restrictions on Afghan women’s 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 Taliban’s 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 Afghanistan’s 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.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/28/despair-is-settling-in-female-suicides-on-rise-in-talibans-afghanistan

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