![]() It’s not clear whether Black girls are dying by suicide in larger proportions than they were in the past, or if those deaths are simply more likely to be counted now. She’s already dead,” she murmured to herself. She ignored the call a second time, but the third time it rang, Monsanto picked up. In the middle of the meeting, Monsanto’s Blackberry started ringing. Monsanto left for an appointment with the heads of Robert Louis Stevenson School, which she was considering as a possible transfer destination for Siwe her daughter’s mental health had been declining, and she thought a change of environment could help. On June 29, 2011, Monsanto woke her daughter before leaving their home, but Siwe crawled back under the covers in protest. Over the next three years, Siwe continued to struggle, feeling pressure to succeed at school, in her extracurricular life and socially. Indeed, Siwe attempted suicide for the first time when she was 12 years old. “It was the trigger that took her over the edge,” says Monsanto. They are more prone to depression and having suicidal thoughts than the general population a 2014 Bureau of Justice Statistics study found that 75% of victims of sexual assault experience “socioemotional problems,” a number that is higher than for almost every other crime. Sexual violence often has a long-term effect on victims. “A piece of my daughter died that day,” she said in a 2019 talk for Dadasphere, an organization that aims at giving a voice and a platform to women of color, primarily from Africa, but also around the world. Monsanto says she learned about the incident directly through Siwe’s father he was arrested shortly after for his crimes and ended up being incarcerated for four years. When she was 11, she was sexually assaulted by her father, from whom Monsanto had separated eight years earlier but was co-parenting with at the time. In Siwe’s case, there may have been a devastating trigger. “It’s going to take a village, to be honest, to uncover what” could help reverse the trend, particularly when no two suicide deaths are exactly alike. “We want to intervene, but we don’t know what the best intervention is yet,” Sheftall says. Now, she says, “we’re trying to figure this out.” There’s rarely a single thing that drives someone to attempt suicide, and similarly there are many factors-from bullying to stigma to childhood trauma and racism-but no one cause that could help to explain the increase in suicides among Black youth. ![]() “Black youths are two times more likely to die by suicide compared to their white counterparts,” says Arielle Sheftall, a researcher at the Center for Suicide Prevention and Research at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and one of the authors of the 2019 Pediatrics study. Actual suicide death rates for Black American girls ages 13 to 19 increased by 182% from 2001 to 2017, according to a 2019 study published in the Journal of Community Health. All told, about 15% of Black female high school students attempted suicide in the year leading up to the CDC’s 2019 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, compared to about 9% of white female students and about 12% of Hispanic female students. decreased from 1991 to 2017, while the number of Black children attempting suicide went up. According to one 2019 Pediatrics study, the number of white children attempting suicide in the U.S. Girls of color are increasingly accounting for this trend. But, Monsanto says, most adults and peers in her daughter’s life didn’t have much awareness of mental-health issues, and were ill-equipped to help. Siwe was diagnosed with anxiety and depression at the age of 9. From early on, Siwe “was very emotional, and would tend to cry a lot,” Monsanto says in the quiet of the Harlem studio where she used to teach yoga and West African dance before the studio closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Siwe was such a gifted dancer that, at age 10, she received a scholarship to the extracurricular program at the prestigious Ailey School in her hometown of New York City. Though Monsanto-a Black American-has no specific ties to South Africa, she chose the name Siwe, an adaptation of the Zulu name Busisiwe. When Dionne Monsanto was pregnant, she decided that she wanted to find a name that means “blessing” for her daughter.
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