Suicide comes days after footage emerged of Ethiopian woman being violently dragged on Beirut street by male employer.
An Ethiopian domestic worker in Lebanon who was filmed being physically abused in public has committed suicide, local media have reported.
The video, first aired by Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation International (LBCI) last week, caused outrage by showing a man abusing Alem Dechasa as she cried on a street outside the Ethiopian embassy in Beirut.
The man was shown grabbing Dechasa and telling her, "get into the car" while she screamed out, "no, no, no". Another man then assisted in dragging Dechasa into the back of a car as she struggled to resist.
Asaminew Debelie Bonssa, Ethiopian general consul in Lebanon, told The Daily Star newspaper in Beirut that Dechasa committed suicide by hanging herself early on Wednesday morning at a psychiatric hospital where she had been taken after the incident.
Bonssa told The Daily Star that he had seen Dechasa on Saturday in the hospital and that she was making plans to return to Ethiopia.
Larger issue
After the video was aired, LBCI used the car's license plate number to identify the man.
"[The man] tried to justify his act by denying that he beat her. He stressed that the worker tried to commit suicide more than once, and that he tried dealing with her humanely, but she refused to go to the airport for deportation," LBCI reported on its website.
Activists in Lebanon, outraged by the video, posted the man's contact information on internet social media sites and called for action against him.
Reports of domestic worker abuse are widespread, with many allegedly locked in employers' homes.
Rola Abimourched, programme co-ordinator at KAFA (Enough) Violence and Exploitation, told Al Jazeera that Dechasa's case may increase scrutiny into the problem.
"This case may indicate the larger issue of migrant domestic workers' vulnerability to abuse in Lebanon, which puts the whole system in question. Namely, the sponsorship system which ties the domestic worker to one employer and does not guarantee her basic human rights," Abimourched said.
"We hope that an investigation into her death will determine what happened."
Source: Al Jazeera and agencies
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...is that they found a way to get rid of her.
Though there are many issues that are undoubtedly touched on by this whole incident, the central one for me is that this lady was going crazy and no one knew what to do about it.
The best they could do was to take her to a psych facility (I won't give it the dignity of calling it a "hospital") where she was allowed to act out the enturbulation she was experiencing and end her life.
Hospitals are supposed to help people get well.
When you can go to a psych facility and GET WELL I will be willing to start calling those facilities hospitals.
But that is not what occurs in those facilities now (except by fluke) and it has never been their purpose. They basically provide a "clean" way to disappear people. This process may include creating mental illness. If they really wanted to cure mental illness, they could do that, because the technology to do that exists. Since that is not what is happening, they are obviously serving some other useful purpose, or they would be shut down (as many, in fact, have been).
In the past, organized psychiatry has embraced various anti-human ideas such as eugenics and "ethnic cleansing." They are, at their worst, a vicious and debased bunch.
But their one "success" has been to continue to convince us that they are the experts on "mental health." While they may know more about this subject than you or I, their main purpose for studying it seems to be to create mental illness.
Stop believing their garbage! For it IS garbage. If you take to heart what the Cs, or Laura, or most of the New Age gurus, or even my teacher LRH tells you about this subject, you will be better off than listening to psychiatrists or neurologists, or most psychologists.