Suicide, it's a little discussed but all too prevalent phenomenon in Belize, but did you know that attempting it was once a criminal offence?
It meant that those who had survived their suicide attempts faced not just a hard road to healing but actual jail time.
And that didn't change until 1997 when Lady Kathy Esquivel, the wife of Prime Minister Manuel Esquivel, returned from a Mental Health conference that had been hosted by then-first lady Rosalind Carter. She came back wanting to take action to decriminalize attempted suicide not just in the interest of reducing trauma but also so that adequate statistics for suicide could be reported without stigma or fear of arrest.
This morning when Lady Kathy appeared on Sunup on 7 she walked hosts Kevin and Renata through the process she and her team went through to justify widespread support for the decriminalization of suicide. Here's that story:
Lady Kathy also shared that at the time attempted suicide was severely underreported both by doctors and police in the interest of not exposing the individuals who would have then been liable to serve jail time.
