#starting this year off strong (increasingly mentally unwell)

[jackalhadrurusluvr]

how to cry for help without crying for help

[zosimekomazgeda-blog]

@eldcstson​ | Your muse reacting to mine dying prompt.

She had begged with the other seconds, to let her go. To leave her out of the Azgeda hundred so she might see his pyre lit. So she could send him off, herself. She didn't care about the coming hellfire on the horizon or the acidic rain. She wanted to be at his side. It wasn't right that she wasn't. He was her family, whether anyone else knew it or not. No one seemed to understand that she was already dead, that she had *died* with him in the fountain. Why couldn't they see it?

For weeks after, she spoke to no one. She barely rose from her bunk to eat every few days, only when the hunger pain managed to cut its way through the numbness that consumed her. Still, long after those exposed had recovered from their radiation sickness, she found herself unwell. The Azfisa sent her to Abby, who scolded her rather severely for not taking care of herself. Had insisted she stay in the infirmary until she had her strength back without telling her why. Zosime struggled to care as thin arms were hooked to tubes and machines. As long as she could return to her grief in peace. Perhaps whatever sickness had come would take her life. Free up her rations for someone in more need.

Abby, it turned out, was the key to her recovery, not only in physical health but also mental. They had something in common, after all; though the skaifisa had been able to call her lover 'husband' properly before he died. They spoke at length, of their travels during Roan's exile. Of all they had seen and done together. Of how awful but necessary it was when he returned to Polis that they part. Having someone to share the burden, someone to grieve with who understood, is what eventually lead her to being able to eat reliably, and even attempt to be productive again.

--

Six years later -

Priamfiya had passed, and the bunker opened to a world that had already started to renew itself. On the ashes of the wave of fiery death, new life grew. Wonkru settled the fields around Polis, and those who once fought and guarded now planted seeds and fished. A proper community.

Zosime walked the forest trail, checking her traps. She had picked up the family business after all.  "Kyon op, Theo. Em ste mous riski." She looked back to the boy plotting his way through the undergrowth, having paused to examine a plant with brilliant red leaves and twisted white flowers.

He was tall for his age, a head full of unruly black curls and eyes the color of ice. He rose and jogged to meet her. "Ai ste fiya, nomi." He ducked a little as she ruffled his hair and together they made their way to check the last of the traps before turning back to the village. The rabbits would make a hearty supper, and their furs would trade well with winter coming.

Once they returned home, she sat with the boy and skinned the rabbits, allowing herself to dwell in memory as the boy sat nearby, carefully cutting vegetables into uneven shapes.

Just over a month after the bunker had been sealed, Abby had brought Zosime back into the infirmary for a check-up. Or at least, that's how she framed it. The exam was far more intimate than she was expecting, but there was something Abby wanted to show her. The picture on the monitor didn't make any sense to the warrior, but a subtle, steady rhythm was something she knew far too well. Abby explained that she didn't want to get Zo's hopes up before everyone had recovered from exposure and her health was back on the mend. After that moment, Zo had taken care of herself.

The swelling of her body over the next year was increasingly more difficult to hide, and though few knew the details of her relationship with Roan, rumors still circulated. Enough that when she grew too round to fight for herself, a few close friends from the guard had taken to making sure she was never left alone around strangers. Not that bunker life was particularly hostile, but old habits die hard, and she did honestly feel better with them there.

Roan's son was the first child born in the bunker, but not the last, and he came into the world small and screaming. He had been the first real seed of hope that they hadn't just buried themselves alive. It was fitting that the son of the king who rallied for peace be the first born member of the new order.

And for Zosime, it gave her a reason to carry on. He needed her strength, and she needed to be strong for him. She couldn't be there to send Roan off, but she had a greater purpose, and it gave her something to hold on to. After all, her life was sworn to protecting his bloodline.

[biofunmy]

Sold to China as a bride, she came home on brink of death

MAZAIKEWALE, Pakistan — Sold by her family as a bride to a Chinese man, Samiya David spent only two months in China. When she returned to Pakistan, the once robust woman was nearly unrecognizable: malnourished, too weak to walk, her speech confused and disjointed.

“Don’t ask me about what happened to me there” was her only reply to her family’s questions, her cousin Pervaiz Masih said.

Within just a few weeks, she was dead.

David’s mysterious death adds to a growing body of evidence of mistreatment and abuses against Pakistani women and girls, mainly Christians, who have been trafficked to China as brides.

AP investigations have found that traffickers have increasingly targeted Pakistan’s impoverished Christian population over the past two years, paying desperate families to give their daughters and sisters, some of them teenagers, into marriage with Chinese men. Once in China, the women are often isolated, neglected, abused and sold into prostitution, frequently contacting home to plead to be brought back. Some women have told The Associated Press and activists that their husbands at times refused to feed them.

A list attained by the AP documented 629 Pakistani girls and women sold to China as brides in 2018 and up to early 2019. The list was compiled by Pakistani investigators working to break up the trafficking networks. But officials close to the investigation and activists working to rescue the women say that government officials, fearful of hurting Pakistan’s lucrative ties to Beijing, have stifled the investigations.

“These poor people have given their daughters for money, and (in China) they do whatever they want to do with them. No one is there to see what happens to the girls,” said Samiya’s cousin, Masih. “This is the height of cruelty. We are poor people.”

David’s death, at the age of 37, shows the extremes of the cruelties trafficked women face. Other women have described being cut off without support, abused physically and mentally. Previously, the AP spoke to seven girls who were raped repeatedly when forced into prostitution. Activists say they have received reports of at least one trafficked bride killed in China but have been unable to confirm.

David now lies buried in an unmarked grave in a small Christian graveyard overgrown with weeds near her ancestral village of Mazaikewale in Pakistan’s eastern Punjab province.

Before her marriage, she lived in a cramped two-room house with her brother Saber and her widowed mother in Francisabad Colony, a congested Christian neighborhood of small cement and brick houses in a warren of narrow streets in the Punjab city of Gujranwala. Christians are among the poorest in Pakistan, a mostly Muslim nation of 220 million people.

At the urging of a local pastor, her brother took money from brokers to force her into marriage with a Chinese man. The pastor has since been arrested on suspicion of working with traffickers. A few months after their marriage in late 2018, David and her husband left to China. “When she left for China she was healthy. She looked good and strong,” said Masih.

Her husband was from a relatively poor, rural part of eastern Shandong province that has long struggled with lawlessness. The conservative culture in such areas strongly favors male offspring, which under China’s strict population control policies meant that a great deal of little girls were never born, hence the demand for trafficked foreign wives. Overall, China has about 34 million more men than women.

After two months, her brother got a phone call telling him to pick his sister up at the airport in Lahore. He found David in a wheelchair, too weak to walk.

The AP met David in late April. Living again in the house in Francisabad Colony, she showed her wedding photos, taken six months earlier. In one, she was dressed in a white gown, smiling, looking robust, with long, flowing black hair.

David barely resembled the woman in the picture. Her cheeks were sunken, complexion sallow, her tiny frame emaciated and frail. She seemed confused, her speech incoherent. When asked about her wedding or time in China, she lost focus — her words wandering — and at one point suddenly stood to make tea, mumbling about the sugar. She paced, repeating, “I am ok. I am ok.” When asked why she looked so different in the wedding photos, she stared vacantly into space, finally saying, “There is nothing wrong with me.”

“She has the evil eye,” said her brother, who was present at the interview.

She died a few days later, on May 1.

Dr. Meet Khan Tareen treated Samiya on her one visit to his clinic in Lahore.

“She was very malnourished and very weak,” with anemia and jaundice, he said in an interview. Preliminary tests suggested several possible ailments, including organ failure, and he said he told her brother she needed to be hospitalized. “She was so malnourished . . . a very, very, very low weight,” he said.

Her death certificate listed cause of death as “natural.” Her brother has refused to talk to the police about his sister. When contacted by the AP in November, he said there was no autopsy and that he had lost her marriage documents, copies of her husband’s passport and the pictures David had showed the AP.

David’s cousin said the family is hiding the truth because they sold her as a bride. “They have taken money. That is why they are hiding everything,” said Masih, who is a member of the town’s Union Council, which registers marriages and deaths.

Breaking a family’s silence is difficult, said a senior government official familiar with the investigations into the sale of brides.

“They might sell their daughters, and even if they discover that the marriage was bad or she is suffering, they would rather ignore it than lose face in front of friends and family,” he said on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media.

The trafficking networks are operated by Pakistani and Chinese brokers who cruise Christian areas willing to sell daughters and sisters. They are known to pay off pastors, particularly at small, evangelical churches, to encourage their flock to do so.

Christian activist Salim Iqbal, who was among the first to sound the alarm last November about bride trafficking, is in touch with a number of Pakistani women in China via groups on the messaging app We Chat. He said one girl recently told him her husband doesn’t give her food or medicine.

Another woman, Samia Yousaf, who was 24 when she was forced into marriage, told the AP of the abuses she suffered in China.

She and her husband went there after she became pregnant. When she arrived, nothing was as her husband had promised. He wasn’t well off. They lived in one room on the edge of a field, infested with spiders.

She gave birth by cesarean section. Her husband’s sister refused to let her hold her son after the birth and controlled when and for how long she could see the child during her six days in the hospital. “I started screaming at her one time when she took my baby,” Yousaf recalled.

Her husband refused to let her breastfeed her son until doctors implored him to allow her to, she said. Unable to walk without assistance, the doctors asked her husband to take her for a walk and he repeatedly let her fall, refusing to help her back up.

After she left the hospital, abuses continued. Her husband denied her food. “He was cruel. I thought he wanted to kill me,” she said.

Three weeks later, authorities threatened her with jail because her visa had expired. Her husband had kept her passport. Frightened and unwell, she pleaded with him to let her and her son go home to Pakistan.

But he refused to let her take the baby. She discovered her name was not on her son’s registration, only her husband’s.

The last time she saw her son was in September 2017, just before her return.

“Every day I think of my baby,” said Yousaf, who works as a nanny in Lahore. “I wonder what he looks like. My heart is always sad.”

———

Associated Press writer Shahid Aslam in Lahore, Pakistan, contributed to this report.

Sahred From Source link World News

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[gyrlversion]

Ex-Big Brother Caroline Wharram should not have been allowed on show

Any suicide is a tragedy, so the two deaths linked to the reality show Love Island should shock me. But the awful truth is this: I’m not surprised at all.

It is seven years since I appeared on the 13th series of Channel 5’s Big Brother, and in that time, I’ve become ever-more convinced that the type of person who wants to hand themselves over to a TV production team is especially vulnerable.

I know quite a few people who’ve appeared on shows like this, and they all have a horrible story to tell.

They’ve become alcoholics, turned to drugs, lost themselves to depression or anxiety, developed eating disorders or pursued obsessive, attention-seeking behaviour on social media.

Caroline Wharram struggling to cope in the Big Brother diary room during her time on the show in 2012

Of course, these tendencies existed before – the problems weren’t created by programme makers, but they were certainly made worse.

The toxic nature of reality TV, the manipulation by producers who are little more than puppeteers, and the instant, snarling effects of fame, can have a devastating effect.

It is a world of self-obsession driven by insecurity – and I should know. It happened to me.

I was an anxious, lonely and sad young girl with a crippling eating disorder and a family history of mental health problems when, at the age of 19, I applied to join Big Brother 2012.

What then took place could – and should – have been predicted.

I crumbled in front of the nation, exhibiting increasingly erratic behaviour. Then, excruciatingly, I was branded a racist after referring to a fellow contestant as a gorilla.

The four years that followed were among the worst of my life as I struggled to rebuild my shattered world.

How I passed the psychological assessments to get on the show continues to baffle me. I should never have been allowed on. And yet, staggeringly, I was. I can only conclude the producers just didn’t care so long as I was entertaining.

I have wonderful, supportive parents and enjoyed an upbringing that most people would call privileged, including a place at a private boarding school in Surrey.

Since the age of nine, however, I had suffered chronic anxiety.

I’m quite academic and had ambitions to be a writer, I’d dropped out of my university degree – after failing to attend a single lecture for six weeks.

Instead, I spent the time in the comfort of my student bedroom, alone, eating masses of food while crying and obsessively weighing myself. I was an anxious, paranoid mess.

None of my peers suspected a thing. When they saw me, I exuded confidence and charisma. I was so good at hiding my misery that when, in January 2012, Big Brother held auditions for a new series, a fellow student told me I’d be perfect because of how ‘wild and fun’ I was. I lapped up her advice.

But today, pictured with her dog Theo, she says: ‘I’ve come through it and am genuinely happy. At weekends, I enjoy walking my dog and writing’

Today it sounds incomprehensible, but I genuinely believed that appearing on television would answer all my problems. I thought it would open a door into a world of celebrity parties, boys, popularity and fame – things I coveted.

More importantly, I could prove to everyone, including myself, that I was the carefree party girl I had always wanted to be. It felt like my happiness depended on getting on that show.

I queued for hours at Wembley Stadium, where the auditions took place among thousands of hopefuls. And I was pleased to find the producers wanted to talk to me, zoning in on my ‘posh’ accent. In fact, it was all they cared about.

A few months later, after more interviews, I was called in for a psychological assessment.

Yet, in my view, the programme makers had little interest in assessing my mental suitability. They failed, for example, to ask me a single question about any mental health problems I might have had.

They didn’t ask whey I’d left university, why I wanted to go on TV or what I thought it would provide for me.

Would I have been honest had they asked these things? Would I have jeopardised my chances of appearing on the show? Probably not. But to me it remains mind-boggling that even the basics were ignored.

‘You’re thick skinned,’ I was told. ‘You don’t care what people think.’ It was so inaccurate I could have laughed. When, finally, the producers told me I’d been successful, I’d never felt so appreciated, so confident and so completely understood.

My parents, though, were devastated. They warned me I wasn’t strong enough, that it would ruin my chances of a career and that the broadcast footage would be manipulated. I didn’t care.

Sure enough, the anxiety and depression returned almost as soon as I entered the Big Brother house.

My behaviour was bizarre. I was eating entire pots of Nutella with a spoon in the morning. At one point, I stuck a toothbrush down my throat to make myself sick in clear view of the cameras. No one on the production team asked if anything might be wrong, or if I needed to speak to someone. Yet, the producers were all too eager to pay attention when I made a casual and thoughtless comment likening another contestant – who was black – to a gorilla.

It was unacceptable, yes. I was perturbed by the fact that he had spent time in prison for robbing elderly ladies and holding them at gunpoint.

But, however stupid I had been, the remark was not intended to be malicious.

The producers, meanwhile, were delighted and played it repeatedly on adverts and on the spin-off show.

After that, I could hear the crowds shouting their hatred for me at each eviction, and I started to hate myself so much that I believed they might be right.

During the week leading up to my departure, the binge-eating escalated. I was crying every day. I couldn’t sleep. My heart palpitations were unbearable. Still there was no offer of psychological help.

When, after seven weeks inside, I was propelled in front of the booing crowds, I was completely unprepared. I was so unwell, in fact, that I couldn’t answer the most basic questions as I was interviewed on live TV.

My attention span had diminished. People assumed I was under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

Next, I was ushered into a meeting with someone from the ‘care team’, but no one mentioned that I’d gained two stone in seven weeks, that my behaviour was extremely odd, or that I was now a public hate-figure. Instead, they said: ‘You’ve provided us with so much entertainment.’ A pile of articles featuring my name was thrown at me. Then, that was it.

After three days of interviews, I was released back into the real world to fend for myself. It would be months before I heard from the programme makers again.

And now I became completely reckless and wild, attending all-night parties, drinking so much I was barred from three nightclubs.

Hoping to prove that I’d risen above the abuse I was receiving on social media, I started re-tweeting the death threats that flowed in.

In private, however, I was in a dark place where nothing mattered, where I would cry hysterically into a pillow. Each day I took enough laxatives to give me crippling stomach cramps. My eyes were bloodshot, my cheeks marked with burst blood vessels.

There was one follow-up meeting with the Big Brother care team, six months later. I acted extraordinarily, yet still nothing was said.

I went back to university but was thrown out as I couldn’t stop interrupting lectures.

I was still living in a fantasy world where I was watched by 44 cameras and five million viewers.

Relations with my parents took a turn for the worse when, at my 21st birthday party, I vomited over the dinner table and passed out. Any chance of rebuilding a normal life had gone.

Online footage from the show was all over the internet, portraying me as a crazy person even though I was clearly unwell. My reputation meant there was no prospect of a job.

I called the production team and begged them to delete the clips. But the woman on the other end of the line said: ‘Nothing has changed. You have always been that person. That is just who you are.’

Huge changes are needed if we are to continue broadcasting reality shows without ruining yet more young lives or devastating families. The programme makers must ensure their ‘care teams’ work in the interests of the vulnerable applicants, for example, instead of serving the interests of the producers.

The psychiatrists and health experts should be truly independent of the production companies.

Psychological assessments must involve a thorough examination of contestants’ mental state and their emotional history.

I’m convinced people who want to go on reality shows are, in fact, the last people who should appear on TV because they’re so insecure, so much in need of validation. Those brave enough to take part must be reminded – and often – that they are free to leave. Today I’ve come through it and am genuinely happy. At weekends, I enjoy walking my dog and writing. I am incredibly grateful to those who have stuck by me. But it could have been so different. Had my parents not been there to pick up the pieces, I dread to think where I would be now – if anywhere at all.

This exploitation has to end.

l In a statement, Big Brother production company Endemol Shine said: ‘We do not recognise Caroline’s account of our support processes. Big Brother has always taken contributor welfare extremely seriously and had a robust assessment and welfare system in place.

‘All contributors were thoroughly assessed by an independent psychiatrist and a psychologist before being considered for the show and a thorough evaluation of a potential housemates’ health and medical history taken into consideration.

‘A team dedicated to contributor welfare, including mental health experts, was on hand to support housemates both during and after transmission.’

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