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A woman who shot herself and survived a failed suicide attempt has made it her life’s mission to raise awareness about a quietly growing mental disorder.
Jazmine Walton, 23, was driven to hopelessness by terrifying hallucinations that plagued her since childhood.
Despite having a supportive family, she saw a hallucination of a man telling her to kill herself.
In 2023, she grabbed 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 reach the hospital, where she required two emergency surgeries to close her wounds and stop the bleeding.
In the weeks that followed, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia, which she manages today with medication.
Before her suicide attempt, Walton was dealing with schizophrenia, which led her to consider suicide. After her suicide attempt, Walston became an advocate for mental health and is sharing her story with her TikTok audience
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Over the past twenty years, psychologists have suggested that the number of cases of schizophrenia has increased worldwide.
Despite professionals raising the alarm, the National Institute of Mental Health has not tracked actual rates of the condition for the past 40 years, so no national data exists for the condition.
Doctors have not yet concluded what is behind this supposed increase. but an NIH study suggested that high-potency 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: Roughly one in twenty schizophrenics die by suicide, compared to about one in a hundred people in the US. average in America.
Walton said she had lived with undiagnosed schizophrenia since childhood and saw glimpses of things that weren’t there, but her symptoms began to worsen 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 was said to ‘instill false ideas’ in Walton [her] head that were frightening,” and encouraged 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 started looking for the gun she knew her ex-boyfriend, who she was living with at the time, kept in their apartment.
For weeks she rehearsed the attempt, picked up the gun, held it to her head and considered pulling the trigger. Each time she put the gun down and walked away.
That is until January 8, 2023, when Walton repeated this fateful routine one last 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, that I know has a plan just to destroy my life.’ I just couldn’t do it.”
When explaining how she is doing these days, 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 mentality is to stay alive every moment of every day, and that’s what I do.”
She fired the gun. The bullet pierced her lip, chin and teeth and lodged in her nose.
Despite the immense pain and feeling as if 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 part of her nose, and called 911.
The still conscious young woman went to look in the mirror and said she saw “nothing but blood.”
Because she had hit her mouth and was missing her 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 through because there was nothing to catch the water in my throat.”
After EMT took her to the hospital, she had to undergo two emergency surgeries. Her heart stopped twice and she was in a coma for two weeks, losing enormous amounts of blood.
“Depression is just a cycle of sadness and the only way to get through it is if you break the chains of sadness,” Walton said, urging people battling mental illness to seek help.
When she woke up, the first person she saw was her family, from whom she had become estranged in the haze of her schizophrenic delusions. She said she immediately took her brother’s hand and her mother told her she loved her.
After waking, Walton was sent to an institution and diagnosed with schizophrenia and psychosis.
Since then, she has raised money to fund reconstructive surgery that restores jaw movement and regularly visits a psychiatrist. She said medication helps control her hallucinations.
She still can’t eat or talk like she used to, and is struggling with some symptoms of her mental illness. It’s hard 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 has built a positive community of people who regularly reach out to thank the Florida native for her posts.
“It gets better,” she said. ‘It’s about how you deal with the day. I’ve been to the brink, but I’m still here to say you can get through it. It all starts with you.’