IN another few weeks, Francesca Tavares will celebrate her 16th birthday. It will be another cloud nine moment for the aspiring lawyer who just earned eight distinctions and one credit at the most recent sitting of the Caribbean Secondary Examinations Certificate (CSEC).

But she almost missed out on it.

The Christian teenager tried to kill herself in January by drinking a bottle of what she thought was household bleach, but which, luckily for her, turned out to be a “watered down” bulk disinfectant instead.

To most people, Francesca was the bubbly Christian girl who was always willing to counsel those in distress. She was baptised at age nine and was a Sunday school teacher at the Swallowfield chapel where she worshipped. She was also very active in school at Wolmer’s Girls’ School.

But she had a deep, dark secret. She was depressed for most of her high school life because other students teased her for being “short and chubby”, and she grew increasingly suicidal.

“I struggled with my body image,” Francesca told participants of a seminar to commemorate World Suicide Prevention Day, observed yesterday. The seminar was organised by Choose Life International and took place on Friday at the Wyndham Kingston Hotel.

“I thought I was fat and ugly, and then I had the acne break-out and I just didn’t feel like I served a purpose. I didn’t think that my existence was changing anything. I thought that I was taking up space and wasting oxygen and I didn’t see how my being here was affecting the world. I was just another body among the millions of people.

“I wasn’t doing well in school either. I was failing and part of it was because of my own low self-esteem. I already thought that I was worthless and I wasn’t that smart anyway, so I really didn’t put out any effort and when the grades came, I figured they reflected what I was, which isn’t true, but I didn’t know that at the time,” she said.

“One of the reasons I was feeling that way was because of some of the music I was listening to. I listened to a lot of heavy rock and the rock music sort of glorified suicide and romanticised it in a way and it made it sound like a really viable option,” she continued.

Things came to a head one Saturday while cleaning the bathroom. The teen said she felt an overwhelming urge to end her life.

“The thoughts came and hit me with a force and I was like; ‘You have to do it now, right now’. (Then) I was like; ‘I don’t want to do it again’. There were conflicting feelings and I was afraid, but I felt cornered at the same time and I was looking for a way out,” she said.

“I was bargaining with myself and I was bargaining with God. I said; ‘Okay God, I won’t take my life. If somebody opens the door right now, I’ll scrap it’. At that same moment, my father opened the door and said ‘are you done’ and I said no I’m not finished and he said are you alright and I said yeah and he said okay and he closed back the door,” the teenager recounted.

But her father’s impromptu visit only created more confusion. “The voice came back and said you see, nobody don’t care about you. If he was a really good parent and if they loved you, he would have picked up that something was wrong, so this was a sign that you have to go through with it,” she said.

The mental battle continued even as the teenager reached under the bathroom cupboard to search for the Clorox, the bleach which her mother had stored there for cleaning purposes.

“I closed my eyes and I just drank, and I said, okay… I was going to be dramatic and everything, so I went into my bed and I wrote something in my book to let people feel bad, and I went to sleep,” said Francesca, who after 30 minutes of closing her eyes, heard her mother downstairs calling for her.

With her mother’s call, came a rude awakening for the teenager — she was not dead. The realisation, she said, made her numb, and even as she descended the stairs to go to her mother, she said she was overwhelmed with anger.

“My attempt failed and I remember thinking to myself; ‘I have to try again’, because it was not effective and I was angry. I was angry with my mother, I was angry with everybody, I was angry with myself for not succeeding in cutting off my life.”

Unknown to the teen, her mother had that very week filled the bleach bottle with another disinfectant which was not as powerful.

“It had finished and I had put in the bulk disinfectant which is much watered down and then after she took it and it burnt up her throat, she went and drank a whole heap of water, which caused the effect to be nullified,” said Frances Tavares who told the Sunday Observer she had no idea her daughter wanted to take her own life.

“All along we tended to be close and she shared a lot with me and I spoke to her about the music that she listened to. I noticed that she was getting more moody and she tended to wear her brother’s khaki shirts and these dark colours and I talked to her and thought it was reaching, but apparently it wasn’t,” she said.

The closeness between mother and daughter, Tavares said, may have resulted from the fact that doctors proclaimed she would have died at birth.

“Before my daughter was born I was having problems with the pregnancy and I actually started to lose the fluids from around her and was having contractions and everything, so I was in the hospital and they wanted me to abort. They wanted me to sign the paper for them to take her from me,” she said.

“I said what can happen to me and they said, ‘Well, you can die because of infection and so on, and the baby is going to die anyhow so you need to save your life’. I said, ‘If I don’t do the operation what will happen?’ They said, ‘You are going to lose it still, and chances are you might die too’. I said, ‘Okay, I trust in the Lord. We will wait on the Lord to do it naturally, but we won’t sign the paper,” she recounted to the Sunday Observer.

It was therefore very frightening for the mother of two to learn that her youngest had attempted suicide. Tavares said she tried talking to her, but when she refused to open up, she sought help from others around her and from trained professionals. But it did little to help. Francesca said she already knew what everyone was going to say, and the questions they were going to ask, so she prepared some generic responses.

“I was just buying time for the next attempt,” the teenager confessed.

It took her an intervention by her mother’s best friend, who, incidentally, had also tried to kill herself, to reach Francesca.

“I remember my God-mother came and she spoke to me, and she spoke to me differently. She told me that she herself had attempted it and I said ‘really?’ and I asked, ‘How did you get out of it?’ because you really don’t want to be there. Depression is not a nice place, it’s awful, it eats at your inside and it consumes you, that’s why you try suicide, because you want out,” she said Friday.

The God-mother, she said, credited God for transforming her life, and there, for the first time, the teenager said she truly accepted Christ.

“I think that’s the first time I really became a Christian, because I don’t think I was one before. I think I carried the title with pride because I am in a Christian family. I go to church every Sunday, I teach Sunday school, I smile and I go to youth meetings and if anybody ask me for advice, I’ll give it to you and I’ll back it up with a scripture,” Francesca shared.

Today, the teen says life could not be better. She is still very active at church and school where she is vice-president of the debating society and a member of the Inter-School Christian Fellowship. The difference is now, she feels free.

She is looking forward to sitting her Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examinations next year, after which she plans to study law and eventually move into foreign diplomacy. Her ultimate goal is to receive a Rhodes scholarship in order to attend the prestigious Oxford University in the United Kingdom.

“Now, life couldn’t have been better. It is now that I am thinking about it that I realise how crazy it was. God has so much in store for me and it is amazing. How could I have thought of taking the gift that He gave me away like that?” she asked.

But not everybody is as lucky as Francesca. Some people who attempt to take their lives are actually successful and so are not able to reflect on the situation like the teen now does.

Founder of Choose Life International Dr Donovan Thomas and author of Confronting Suicide: Helping Teens at Risk , said 40 persons have committed suicide since the start of this year. Between 1996 and 2009, he said, 779 people claimed their own lives. Thomas, who started the faith-based organisation with his wife Faith in 2008 after counselling countless persons who contemplated suicide, said he gets calls almost every day for help.

“The prediction from the World Health Organisation is that by the time we get to 2020, 1.5 million people will die annually across the world (from suicide). The prediction is that suicide will become one of the top 15 causes of death around the world, it is coming our way and we have got to be proactive,” he warned.

Chief education officer in the Ministry of Education Grace McLean said the problem was extremely worrisome for school administrators who have to deal with the situation at their own institutions.

“The last school year has been extremely challenging for us in the education system. In March and April of this year, we saw over eight cases of actual suicides and of course through the support of institutions and organisations such as Choose Life, we were able to abort several others that would have taken place,” she said.

“At one particular school, there were eight young ladies who attempted suicide on the same day. It is really heart-breaking,” said the educator who pointed out that some of the guidance counsellors are themselves traumatised because of the number of cases coming before them.

She said the Ministry has been implementing various strategies to deal with the problem. They have trained teachers and have conducted workshops regionally and locally to increase their knowledge of the issue and have also developed a manual to inform guidance counsellors on how to treat with students with suicidal tendencies. They have also strengthened their partnership with the health, labour and security ministries and also collaborated with the telecommunication companies in the island to offer a free hotline for students with emotional issues or suicidal thoughts.

“We were faced with the harshest reality and perhaps a rude awakening in my mind as I saw what was happening. Within a three-week period, we had over a million calls and let me tell you, I don’t think even 10 per cent of those calls were teenagers or children in school. These calls were coming from adults who were hurting; these calls were coming from adults who were having marriage problems; boyfriend problems; financial problems; all different types of problems,” said McLean.

“I did not realise that so many people in this country needed somebody to talk to,” she said.

The challenges being faced by today’s children are nothing new, McLean said, but she feels they are not being encouraged enough to develop a “fighting sprit” which would help them to overcome the various difficulties.

“They feel that their last resort, or not even the last, the first resort is to take their lives,” she said.