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.”
Banning the reporting of suicide stats to try to save face is some nasty shit. Suicide is often a last attempt at asserting autonomy.
Yeah, but that’s what all authoritarian states do.
Honestly it’s so heartbreaking to read stories like this.
FYI: There’s a study published in March 2023 investigating the Prevalence and predictors of depression among women in Afghanistan (pdf, 9 pages). It is obvious that women are facing a harsh life reality which is far beyond what we can imagine here in our western world.
A recent national survey in Afghanistan reported that 47% of women suffered from mental health illnesses including depression [10]. An earlier survey conducted in 2003 evaluated the depression rate among women in Afghanistan. The survey reported high rates of clinical depression (73–78%) and suicidal ideation among Taliban-controlled regions versus those in a Pakistani refugee camp (28%) [11]. The provision of overall healthcare services including psychiatric services has been halted or inaccessible due to an ongoing political crisis in the country [12]. […]
Women in Afghanistan face chronic trauma, emotional abuse, and patriarchal community ideals which may lead extreme depression and suicidal thoughts [13, 14]. Gender-based violence against women, forced marriages, and the impact of war are the most important factors for this [14]. Traditional practices and customs, early marriage, and teenage pregnancies make it more difficult for women to obtain an education, learn new skills, and inherit property, all of which contribute to poor mental health outcomes [15].
This article strikes me in a way that I’m finding very difficult to put into words. Basically I can’t imagine this is any business of the average Guardian reader who is not going to be able to do anything about it other than to support another invasion or contra-like rebel group. Anyone speaking English as a first language has no credibility to exercise soft power to mitigate this in any way, and that is because for centuries the governments of people who primarily speak English have cemented the idea in the Afghan national identity (maybe the only nationally unifying idea) that Westerners are treacherous and not to be trusted meddling in Afghanistan’s internal affairs. This is especially given that this very meddling there and with other nearby countries is why the Taliban exists in the way it does. However this is addressed our involvement would not help and would likely lead to another exploitative apparatus. Maybe it might soften readers’ attitudes towards accepting refugees, but if they’re already reading The Guardian I’m not sure this is going to change anyone’s mind from one position to the other.
We have groups of people who are massively disproportionately ending their lives out of hopelessness in our nations and our spheres of influence. We may be able to do something about our own cultural flaws or those of our allies with whom we have some credibility.
I understand your concerns but: sometimes the role of an ally is to listen, to acknowledge, and to bear witness.
Not to jump in screaming “here I come to save you”. The immediate knee-jerk focus of “should we invade” is galling, sure, but I don’t think the alternative needs to be to let’s all look away and block our ears.
Knowing what other people in this world are going through is important part of being a human.
When I met someone who is in exile and I was familiar with the basics of why she is an exile, that mattered to her.
I’m just one ill woman in a small country of 5 million, but when I saw some people online warning that their country had just blacked out their internet, the fact that I was already up to speed with the implications in that context meant I could immediately contact our foriegn affairs minister to ask we send a signal that the world is watching -and I got a reply, too, about the diplomatic actions we were taking.
When I protested Apartheid I was just a child. Years later, I found out some of those suffering under Apartheid had heard of our tiny country’s protest and taken comfort from it at that time.
No, I did not solve anyone’s problems, and nor did they want me to - but it still matters.
I agree with you in general. My concern is specifically with a place which for centuries has asked us to leave them alone and we refuse to. This situation is of course terrible, and our (my country’s) actions in their country is the indirect cause of their dilemma, but I don’t think that we (meaning our institutions) are the ones we can trust to help them. That being the case my view is softened by your appeal just to express support on an individual level because it’s probably the best we can do with the way things are. I really do hope they can find some way to resolve this. My concern is just with encouraging support in our part of the world to go make things worse again, which is all we have been doing to their part of the world for a very long time.
I understand the concern you feel - and I agree that public support for invasive interventions can be inflamed (or in some cases, downright manufactured) by news media.
I think you’re right to be wary of encouraging support, and we in the west as a whole should resist buying into or perpetuating those kinds of discourses.
In this case, I don’t think that’s what this article, or the partner journalists, or the underlying study, are intending, though. This is a “world news” section so by its very nature it is mostly about things outside our remit. (I acknowledge that this is easier for me to say as someone in a small nation that did not join the coalition to invade Afghanistan. If I were in a country with huge global political power it would probably feel a bit glib to just say “we” are not in charge).
Not really sure why you keep bashing The Guardian… Have you seen the UK’s top most read papers (The Sun and The Daily Mail)?
I’m not bashing the Guardian, and out of widespread publications I would definitely say they are among the best. My criticism is based on their primary and secondary audiences residing in places whose governments’ actions have rendered them incapable of assisting Afghanistan or its people. As a side note my first exposure to The Daily Mail was when it was being distributed for free at the airport, and it made me so angry I threw it in the trash with much more force than I realized. Awful racist rag.
Edit: I’m suggesting in my previous comment that Guardian readers are already likely to support refugees or else they would be reading the Sun or the Daily Mail instead.
I’m still not entirely sure, what your point is. Don’t report things already known to be bad? You seem to be enjoying using overly complex sentences, but you don’t actually say anything worth typing.
You seem to be enjoying using overly complex sentences, but you don’t actually say anything worth typing.
And you seem to enjoy adding unnecessary sentences which contribute nothing but malice. This is your reminder to be nice on our instance.
Sorry for the sentences, it’s about as much as I can do to keep from writing a single run-on. My concern is specifically with English-language publishing exclusively about issues specifically in Afganistan only now that they are no longer under English-language occupation and have no wish to have us back in any way. For almost two decades you would only hear about Afganistan if we killed someone there and we paid absolutely no mind to any social problems which existed as a consequence of our occupation unless we could credibly blame them on our enemies. Now that the Taliban run things (which are a group originally empowered and radicalized by the US) now we need to pay attention to the social problems when they want nothing to do with us because of literal centuries of bad behavior of specifically the Anglosphere and Russia in their borders. Everything I’ve heard about Afghanistan is that they want us to leave them alone. I think it’s terrible when people face such hopelessness that they feel the need to end their lives, and I’d like to see more reporting on what we can address and less reporting on a part of the world which for very good reason don’t want us involved. I hope this situation can be remediated, but I don’t trust our institutions not to harm them further, and they trust our institutions even less.
Removed by mod
I’m really not sure how that is a valid summary of what I wrote. There were plenty of stories about the issues of US occupation of Afghanistan otherwise I wouldn’t know about them. What I meant was that these particular stories were pretty much absent other than abstractly from mainstream discourse and publication. There is a long history of Western powers causing destruction in Afghanistan. To name a few examples, I blame the imperialist behavior of the English and Russian governments in the 19th century, the Soviet and US government in the 80’s when we were training the Taliban to take their present form to resist Soviet invasion, various western NGOs which shipped weapons to Afghanistan in the guise of providing aide, and I blame the behavior of the American-lead coalition forces whose destruction once again cemented what I understand is the only unifying idea of the various Afghani peoples, which is to resist Western influence in their country. During this period I paid taxes in the United States instead of rebelling, so I am indeed partially to blame for their current state of affairs. For all these reasons I am encouraging people of Western nations, whose governments have done nothing but harm to Afghanistan for centuries despite Afghani objections for the entire period of time, not to support further intervention and therefore destruction in Afghanistan. I would like to see this issue resolved of course but it will have to be through methods which do not involve the West. I also think it’s our responsibility to accept refugees from Afghanistan since we caused the issues which they are fleeing.
Removed by mod
Ah yes… Let’s discrimnate based on language, that’ll help people progress.
🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
They have explicitly linked it to Taliban restrictions on every aspect of women’s existence, from a ban on education above elementary level and a prohibition on most work, to a bar on entering parks, bathhouses and other public spaces.
Shaharzad Akbar, a former chair of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission – an organisation targeted by the Taliban insurgency and now operating in exile – said social stigma meant such secrecy was common.
“The rare instance when [relatives] willingly admit to suicide is when they don’t want any member of the family to be accused of murder,” said Akbar, who is now executive director of Rawadari, a new Afghan human rights organisation.
Warnings about female suicides are only intensifying as the Taliban tighten controls on every aspect of women’s lives, most recently banning beauty salons.
In May, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, said he was “alarmed about widespread mental health issues and accounts of escalating suicides among women and girls”.
“They don’t have much room for expressing their protests and disagreements,” said Julie Billaud, an anthropology professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute and the author of Kabul Carnival, a book about gender politics in postwar Afghanistan.
Saved 84% of original text.
Removed by mod
Who is “they”? Because Afghan women sure as hell didn’t choose this.
Removed by mod
Ah yes lemme just fight armed soldiers with my bare hands.
Comments like this make me wish we had a downvote button.
Removed by mod
deleted by creator
Removed by mod
I found another article that gives a few numbers.
One mental health worker in the western province of Herat who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals said the Taliban had barred health professionals from publishing or sharing statistics on suicide, which had previously been published regularly.
Herat had the most reported suicide attempts of the provinces for which data was obtained: 123, including 106 by women. There were 18 reported deaths, 15 of them women
Removed by mod
two thirds are still two thirds - whether that’s 3 people out of 4 or 750.000 out of 1.000.000. And given that
A survey published in the journal BMC Psychiatry two months before the Taliban takeover found nearly half the population suffered from psychological distress.
I think the numbers are really worrying.
Especially if you consider that in the rest of the world the majority of successful suicides are from males. It takes a lot of disparity to bring it to those numbers.
deleted by creator
Removed by mod
Dude, they’re saying it’s worrying if 3 out of every 4 people who commit suicide are women
Removed by mod
deleted by creator
Do you think it’s going to be significantly less than in other places? What would be the reason for that?
I agree that absolute numbers would be very helpful, but stating and sharing trends can definitely be helpful. Not being able to verify them is a problem though.
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.
