If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts or a crisis, please contact the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 immediately.
A woman who shot herself and survived a failed suicide attempt has made it her life’s mission to raise awareness about a silently growing mental health disorder.
Jazmine Walton, 23, was driven to despair by terrifying hallucinations that tormented her since she was young.
Despite having a supportive family, she had a hallucination of a man who would tell her that she had to commit suicide.
In 2023, she took her then-ex-boyfriend’s .45-caliber pistol and shot herself in the face, cutting off her lip, teeth, and part of her chin and nose.
Miraculously, the young woman from Daytona Beach, Florida, survived long enough to make it to the hospital, where she required two emergency surgeries to close her wounds and stop the bleeding.
In the following weeks, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, which he now treats with medication.
Before her suicide attempt, Walton suffered from schizophrenia that led her to contemplate suicide. After her suicide attempt, Walston became a mental health advocate and shares her story with her TikTok audience.
Over the past two decades, psychologists have suggested that rates of schizophrenia have increased worldwide.
Although professionals raised the alarm, the National Institute of Mental Health has not tracked actual rates of the condition over the past 40 years, so there is no national data on the condition.
Doctors have not reached a conclusion about what is behind this supposed increase, but an NIH study suggested that very potent cannabis use could increase the incidence in young men, and was responsible for around 30 percent of the cases studied.
Other theories include increased awareness leading to more diagnoses and a larger population size overall.
Walton is not alone: About one in 20 schizophrenics dies by suicide, compared to about one in 100 people in average in america.
Walton said he lived with undiagnosed schizophrenia since he was young, seeing flashes of things that weren’t there, but his symptoms began to increase in early adulthood.
The disorder, which can cause visual and auditory hallucinations, instilled deep fear and paranoia in Walton, who was plagued by an imaginary character called “The Enemy.”
‘The Enemy’ appeared as a tall white man with dark hair and gave Walton ‘false ideas in (his) head that were terrifying’, as well as encouraging suicide.
This drove a wedge between Walton and her family, although she said she knew they wanted to help.
These hallucinations became so severe that she looked for the gun that she knew her ex-boyfriend, with whom she was living at the time, kept in his apartment.
For weeks, he rehearsed the attempt, picking up the gun, pointing it at his head, and contemplating pulling the trigger. Each time, she lowered the gun and walked away.
That was until January 8, 2023, when Walton repeated this fateful routine one last time and decided to move on.
The young woman recalled: “I said, ‘I can’t live a life where I hear a voice that I know is the Enemy, that I know has this plan just to destroy my life.’ I just couldn’t.”
Explaining how he is doing today, Walton said: “I’m always in survival mode. I try to outsmart the enemy all the time. I don’t ever 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 gun. The bullet passed through his lip, chin and teeth and lodged in his nose.
Despite the immense pain and feeling as if an explosion had just occurred in front of his body, he remained conscious. Her ex-boyfriend, Aidan, came into the room screaming.
He later said he saw teeth on the ground and a piece of his nose, and called 911.
The young woman, still conscious, went to look in the mirror and said she saw “nothing but blood.”
Because he had bruised his mouth and was missing his chin, lip and teeth, Walton remembers trying to speak, but nothing came out. Dazed and terrified, she walked to the kitchen to drink some water and calm down.
“When I tried to drink the water, it just fell out because there was nothing there to catch the water in my throat.”
After paramedics took her to the hospital, she underwent two emergency surgeries. His heart stopped twice and he was in a coma for two weeks afterwards, having lost enormous amounts of blood.
“Depression is just a cycle of sadness and the only way to overcome it is to break the chains of sadness,” Walton said, urging people struggling with mental illness to seek help.
When he woke up, the first person he saw was his family, from whom he had drifted away in the haze of his schizophrenic delusions. She said she immediately grabbed her brother’s hand and her mother told her she loved her.
After waking up, Walton was sent to a facility and diagnosed with schizophrenia and psychosis.
Since then, he has raised money to fund reconstructive surgery that restored jaw movement and has begun seeing a psychiatrist regularly. He said the medications help him control his hallucinations.
He still can’t eat or talk like he used to and is dealing with some of the symptoms of his mental disorder. It has been difficult to see how her face has changed since the surgery and she said sometimes she doesn’t recognize herself in the mirror.
But she is driven by a new purpose: helping others feel less alone online. She has built a positive community of people who regularly stop by to thank the Florida native for her messages.
“Everything gets better,” he said. ‘It’s about how you handle each day. I’ve been on the edge, but I’m still here to tell you that you can get through it. It all starts with you.’