After her father's death and the upheaval of leaving Libya, Fatma Ahmed Sherif fell into a depression in Germany that nearly killed her (EP 11).
She gained weight to 99 kilograms. She was sleeping eighteen hours a day. She stopped attending classes, stopped functioning, stopped caring. The grief of her father's death, the isolation of Germany, the cultural displacement — none of it was a single cause. It was cumulative. Everything collapsed at once.
She reached a point where she stood on the sixth floor of her building and considered jumping. The plan was not abstract. She was there.
A roommate intervened. The details were not elaborated — it was the roommate's presence, not a dramatic rescue. Someone was there. That was enough to change the trajectory.
Fatma did not frame this as a redemption story. She described it plainly: she was at the bottom, someone noticed, and she did not die. The depression was clinical, the danger was real, and the margin between survival and death was a roommate being home.
This is one of the most direct accounts of suicidal ideation in the Damiri archive. Fatma spoke about it without dramatisation or inspirational framing. For Libyan and Arab audiences — where mental health remains heavily stigmatised — the act of saying it out loud, on a podcast, was itself significant.
The story also captures a specific experience of the diaspora: the person who appears to be building a life abroad (medical school, Germany, opportunity) while internally disintegrating.