What recovery requires: Aya's year after a suicide attempt

When 23-year-old Aya* walked into the emergency room, she had no visible wounds and no words for why she was there. Hallucinations, visual and auditory, crowded out her thoughts. Too depleted to speak, she let her sister Afa* answer for her.

"She's attempted suicide."

Looking back, Aya doesn’t recall feeling particularly sad that night. “I don’t know what kind of state that I was in when I did it, I was actually in a very happy state," she recounted to the Maldives Independent. 

“It wasn’t like ‘I’m so sad I’m gonna kill myself.’ I just felt happy I wasn’t going to wake up tomorrow. And then when I woke up the next day I could hear the blood going through my system. Every time I closed my eyes I was hallucinating. I was also doing auditory hallucinations throughout that day.”

After her attempt, Aya confided in her sister about what happened. Not wanting to alarm their parents, the sisters quietly took the bus to the hospital that Friday morning. Once at the ER, Aya was admitted. She had her vitals checked and her heart monitored with regular ECGs.

Afa, in tears throughout, finally called their family. They remember their mother’s reaction: “Mom told us not to tell other people and told us to tell people Aya had diarrhoea.” 

A 2025 study identified social stigma as a key factor that discourages people from seeking help. Earlier research found that people with mental health issues are often viewed with negative stereotypes: 32.6 percent of respondents believed the cause is lack of religiosity, while 12 percent attributed it to cowardice. Nevertheless, 94 percent of the respondents believe mental illness can be cured, with most supporting professional intervention. 

Stigma is one barrier. The system itself is another: a single public Mental Health Centre serving two sites, more than 1,300 people on the waitlist for an appointment at the Indira Gandhi Memorial Hospital in Malé, and private clinics with uneven Aasandha coverage. The state has committed to rebuilding by 2029. Aya navigated what currently exists.

Aya spent the night at the hospital, waiting for professional help to arrive. Because she was admitted on a Friday, the on-call psychiatrist didn’t come until the next day. After a brief consultation, Aya was discharged. 

A family member was assigned to hold her prescription medication and only give her the required dose. Follow-up appointments were scheduled. Aya was encouraged to continue seeing the therapist she had started seeing a month earlier. 

“I wish they kept me for a while, cause it wasn’t like it just took that day to recover," said Aya, who still struggles with the after-effects. She reported experiencing tremors, rapid heart rates, anxiety, and a dissociative state that lasted up to six months.

“My nervous system was really wrecked, I don’t know what kind of care they could’ve done for my nerves. But I was physically shaking for a year, the first weeks were really bad. I wish the psychiatrist was more consistent checking how my symptoms are.”

Aya’s first consultation with a psychiatrist at IGMH was during 2021, when she was told she had an adjustment disorder due to the pandemic. However, Aya believed this diagnosis was inaccurate, due to her difficult childhood and longstanding struggles with socialising. Eventually, she got a more accurate diagnosis for her mental health concerns. 

After her suicide attempt, Aya continued monthly online therapy sessions at a clinic. 

“I would cry through the entire session," she recalled. But she didn’t feel the therapist took her care seriously. Appointments were sometimes rescheduled at the last minute for trivial reasons, eventually leading Aya to end the relationship. 

“I feel like she delayed my recovery a lot. She wouldn’t see me consistently and she kept cancelling. At the end I had a confrontation and breakdown with her and told her I feel like she doesn’t care about me. She asked why and I said she wouldn’t see me consistently. She said she wasn’t doing that because she thought I was doing okay, but how could she think that when I was crying through the session?”

Eventually, Aya found a care system that worked for her at the Therapy Centre. 

“After I changed to the Therapy Centre psychiatrist I did much better. My psychiatrist tells me what’s happening inside my body. I wish someone had explained the effect it had on my nervous system and why I have tremors," she said. "I was in a state of heightened anxiety for a couple of months, it is PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder], literally what happens to the body after a traumatic event."

Aya continues to endure the long-term effects of her suicide attempt. She hopes to see mental health services in the Maldives improve. Stressing the importance of healthcare professionals who take symptoms seriously, she said: “There is always a fear when seeing a new doctor, that they will be dismissive. Everyone who seeks mental health care meets professionals that don't take us seriously. It takes so long to find a good therapist or psychiatrist. It's very draining, especially in such vulnerable states. It can make you lose hope that you will get proper help. It also delays your progress in healing. It can also put you in danger, especially in situations where you're at a risk of harming yourself."

Despite everything, Aya now hopes to live a fulfilling life.

“At some point, I felt my life was so unbearable that I couldn't keep living it. Through every tough decision regarding friendships and relationships, I have been telling myself that it's now my responsibility to create a life I want to live.” 

But she knows it’s not something she can do alone. “Throughout all this, the most important thing I've learned is the importance of building a good support system," she said. “I used to think it was impossible because I grew up too anxious to form genuine friendships. It felt like it took me all of my adolescence and a lot of trial and error. My litmus test for friendship now is to choose people who will stand by me through illness. It is genuinely important for your health to stop being around people who make your mental health worse. In some cases, it can be a matter of life and death.”