I WAS A SUICIDAL ADOLESCENT IN A SLUM IN THE PHILIPPINES – RESILIENCE HELPED ME RISE TO THE CHALLENGE AND DO A PHD

Abstract

It happened three days after Valentine’s Day. Big rocks fell over houses, leaving more than a thousand bodies dead and several children orphaned. ‘J’ was one of the survivors of the 2006 Guinsaugon landslide in Southern Leyte. Both her parents were missing after the tragedy, leaving the teenager in the hands of her older siblings. But luck was never quite on her side; ‘J’ and her siblings had to live in separate towns to survive. A year and a half later, ‘J’ wrote on her bedroom wall: ‘Kung ‘di lang kasalanan magkapamatay, ginawa ko na [If only it wasn’t a sin to commit suicide, I would’ve done it already]. ’On the kitchen wall, she wrote: ‘Walang nagmamahal sa akin [Nobody loves me].’ A few months later, through the help of mental health advocates, ‘J’ was diagnosed with clinical depression and received psychosocial support. Soon enough, she scrubbed her walls.–Excerpted from Rappler (Rodriguez, 2015).