If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts or a crisis, please reach out immediately to the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988.
A woman who shot herself and survived in a failed suicide attempt has made it her life mission to raise awareness about a quietly rising mental health disorder.
Jazmine Walton, 23, was driven to hopelessness by terrifying hallucinations that plagued her since she was young.
Despite having a supportive family, she saw a hallucination of a man that would tell her that she had to commit suicide.
In 2023 she took her then ex-boyfriend’s .45 caliber handgun and shot herself in the face, shearing off her lip, teeth and part of her chin and nose.
Miraculously, the young woman from Daytona Beach Florida, survived long enough to reach hospital, where she required two emergency surgeries to close her wounds and stop the bleeding.
In the weeks after, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia, which she manages today with medication.
Before her suicide attempt, Walton was dealing with schizophrenia that led her to contemplating suicide. After her suicide attempt, Walston became an advocate for mental health and shares her story with her TikTok audience
Over the past two decades, psychologists have suggested that rates of schizophrenia have been increasing worldwide.
Despite professionals ringing the alarm, the National Institute of Mental Health hasn’t been tracking actual rates of the condition over the past 40 years, so national data for the condition doesn’t exist.
Doctors haven’t concluded what’s behind this supposed uptick, but an NIH study suggested that highly potent cannabis use could increase the incidence in young men- and was responsible for about 30 percent of cases studied.
Other theories include increased awareness leading to more diagnoses and bigger population sizes overall.
Walton isn’t alone, roughly one in 20 schizophrenics die by suicide, compared to about one in 100 people on average in America.
Walton said she lived with undiagnosed schizophrenia since she was young, seeing glimpses of things that weren’t there, but her symptoms began to ramp up in early adulthood.
The disorder, which can cause visual and auditory hallucinations, instilled a deep fear and paranoia in Walton, who was plagued by an imaginary character named ‘The Enemy’.
‘The Enemy’ appeared as a tall white man with dark hair and would give Walton ‘false ideas in [her] head that were frightening,’ as well as encourage suicide.
This drove a wedge between Walton and her family, even though she said she knew they wanted to help.
These hallucinations became so bad that she sought out the handgun that she knew her ex-boyfriend, whom she was living with at the time, kept in their apartment.
For weeks, she would rehearse the attempt, picking up the gun, holding it to her head and contemplating pulling the trigger. Every time, she put the gun down and walked away.
That is until January 8th 2023, when Walton repeated this fateful routine one final time, and decided to go through with it.
The young woman recalled: ‘I said, “I can’t live a life where I hear a voice that I know is the Enemy, who I know has this plan to only destroy my life.” I just couldn’t’.’
When explaining how she’s doing nowadays, Walton said: ‘I’m always in survival mode. I try to outsmart the Enemy all the time. I never want to be in that situation again. My mindset is to stay alive every moment of every day, and that’s what I’m doing.’
She fired the handgun. The bullet pierced through her lip, chin and teeth and lodged in her nose.
Despite the immense pain, and feeling like an explosion had just occurred in front of her body, she remained conscious. Her ex-boyfriend, Aidan came into the room, screaming.
He later said he saw teeth on the ground, and a piece of her nose, and called 911.
The still-conscious young woman went to look in the mirror she said she saw ‘nothing except blood’.
Since she had hit her mouth, and was missing her chin, lip and teeth, Walton remembers trying to talk, but nothing came out. Dazed and terrified, she walked to the kitchen to drink some water and calm down.
‘When I attempted to drink the water, it just fell straight through because nothing was there to catch the water down my throat.’
After EMT’s took her to the hospital, she was put into two emergency surgeries. Her heart stopped twice, and she was in a coma for two weeks afterwards, having loss massive amounts of blood.
‘Depression is just a cycle of sadness and the only way to make it through is if you break the chains of sadness,’ Walton said, urging people who are fighting mental illness to seek help
Upon waking, the first person she saw was her family, whom she had been estranged from in the haze of her schizophrenic delusions. She said she immediately reached for her brother’s hand, and that her mother told her she loved her.
After waking, Walton was sent to a facility and diagnosed with schizophrenia and psychosis.
Since then, she’s raised money to fund reconstructive surgery that’s restored jaw movement, and has begun seeing a psychiatrist regularly. She said medication helps manage her hallucinations.
She still can’t eat or talk the same as she used to, and deals with some of the symptoms of her mental disorder. It’s been difficult to see how her face has changed since the surgery, and she said she sometimes doesn’t recognize herself in the mirror.
But she’s driven by a new purpose: to help other people feel less alone online. She’s garnered a positive community of people who regularly reach out to thank the Florida native for her messages.
‘It gets better,’ she said. ‘It’s about how you handle each day. I’ve been to the edge, but I’m still here to say you can make it through. It all starts with you.’
