Female suicides on rise under Taliban regime

First, her dreams of becoming a doctor were dashed by the Taliban's ban on women's education. Then her family set up a forced marriage to her cousin, a heroin addict. Latifa* felt her future had been snatched away.

- Zahra Nader

"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.