Twelve-year-old Francisca Abreu was anxious. It was February 20, 2007, and she laid her head down on her desk in her seventh-grade science class. "I was crying; I was very depressed. I had written a note to myself," Francisca remembers. "I just said I can't do this anymore. I want to kill myself."
Francisca's school called home, and her mother, Isabel Valdez, learned for the first time that her daughter was in serious trouble. "I never told her," says Francisca. "I never bothered her; she probably never bothered to notice."
Such a disconnect between mothers and daughters is what Dr. Luis Zayas, a psychologist at Washington University, suspects is leading an alarming number of Latina teenagers to want to end their lives. READ FULL STORY
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