"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."
Since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, there has been a 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 a public health crisis. The data suggests Afghanistan has become one of the very few countries where more women than men die by suicide.
This story is from the September 01, 2023 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
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This story is from the September 01, 2023 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
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