A California mother is warning others about the risk of suicide amid coronavirus stay-at-home orders after her teenage daughter hanged herself last week.
Danielle Hunt said her 15-year-old daughter, Jo’Vianni “Jo” Smith, was an athlete who loved softball and basketball and was active on social media before her death.
“It’s like, how do you explain a girl like her?” Hunt told FOX40. “If you met her one time, like, she made an impact in your life.”
Smith didn’t leave a note before she died, but Hunt believes her daughter had trouble coping with California’s stay-at-home order.
“I felt that I was doing all that I could as a parent to leave the communication open,” she said.
Hunt is now advocating for suicide prevention and encouraging parents to check in with their kids during the pandemic.
“Sometimes we may need to stop and worry about the kids that we don’t think we need to worry about,” she said
President Trump warned in March that suicides could increase under social distancing orders due to the coronavirus.
“You have tremendous responsibility. We have jobs. We have … people get tremendous anxiety and depression, and you have suicides over things like this when you have terrible economies. You have death probably in far greater numbers than the numbers we are talking about with regard to the virus,” Trump said.
More people died of suicide, for example, in a single Tennessee county than of complications associated with the coronavirus across the entire state, one local official warned in March. Suicides have also been reported in other countries, including in Germany, where a government finance minister took his own life over fears regarding the coronavirus.
