I learned of the death of college student Carly Henley two days after her passing, on October 6, 2010. In the days soon to follow it became clear that scores and scores of people were wounded to the core by the loss. Wonderful evidence around the internet serves to almost suspend Carly Henley's personable allure, her impressive musical talent, and a short life the likes of which most anybody could envy.

Various reports tell of her short term struggle with depression of perhaps three months in duration. Significant in that was the introduction of anti-depressant drug Zoloft via prescription some two weeks before Carly took her own life.

Not lost on me now, finally, is the wording in the "Black Box Warning" with Zoloft, which states that antidepressants may increase the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior in persons younger than 25. Risk is especially heightened during the first two months of taking anti-depressants.

The labels on anti-depressant drugs in the U.S. were altered to reference young adults aged 18 to 24 just three years earlier - in 2007.

It is my belief, now, that Carly just happened to land among the small percentage of anti-depressant users who are susceptible to being so affected by a powerful drug such as Zoloft.

One need not ever have known such a remarkable woman to feel the pain all around at the loss of Carly Henley.


So many life lessons are so well represented by Carly Henley's compelling spirit. Let me see if I can help some to gain fuller appreciation for a woman who continues to inspire everyone who ever knew of her.



Carly Henley would be 32 today

    The more time that passes, the more challenging it is to visualize what Carly Henley's life would be like today when all we have is the instinct to project forward from the enviable twenty-year-old she was when she left this life.

    First we want to (completely guess) that she would have married well, and that she'd be a mom by now, and in a great number of cases just that alone takes someone away from the spotlight with their own full approval and consent.  Too few of us stand around and marvel at the mom down the street merely for her performance as parent.  We only look up when there's a noise... crying... yelling... comforting... and those instances are seldom ideal for pausing to praise anybody's mother.

    Would Carly Henley still be singing?  -   in some format it's certain that she would, but who can guess what her talents, interests and abilities that way would have morphed into, especially when they might have been carefully structured around life as a parent.

    We can't know either whether Carly would have been a working mother, or whether she would be the stay-at-home mom behind the scenes.

    Is life any better in 2022 where it concerns suicide than it was in 2010?  Probably not:

Suicide rates are up almost across the board over the past 10 years while in Carly Henley's then-age group the rate in 2011 was 11 per 100,000 individuals and the rate in 2020 was 14 per 100,000 individuals.  It is possible that the two can't be fairly compared because of Covid factors, but the number for Carly's then-age group was already at 14 per 100,000 as of 2017.

Social environment in North America is almost surely more difficult and challenging in 2022 than it was in 2010 so it can't be too great a surprise that suicide rates are higher now.  Although the boost from "11" to "14" is a staggering increase of 27%.

    
        What would it be like for girls who were maybe 5 or 6 years old at the time of Carly Henley's death to happen across Carly and her story on YouTube as the 17/18-year-olds they are today?  Would they go through the same path through exceptional curiosity about what made Carly think that was a suitable answer and then through personal awe over all it seemed that Carly had in life, before being completely stymied as most are at Carly's tragic ending?

        Most important:  Can those girls gain anything from just knowing Carly Henley's story and maybe seeing suicide in a bit of a different light?  Who out there doesn't envy all that Carly Henley was while she graced this earth?  Is there a more prominent universal conclusion than to feel that nothing could be worth not getting to know where such rare trajectory would have taken Carly Henley to and through this 32nd birthday?

        You can reason that Carly Henley had approximately the same chances as most anyone to have been derailed by poor choices or personal tragedies if she were still with us, but it is difficult to let yourself believe that bad luck or fortune beyond her control would have irreparably harmed Carly in any way.

        Nearly a dozen years later and the person Carly Henley was at age 20 continues to seem like just the fairy tale existence about which millions of young women would dream if only their imaginations could create such a pleasant thought.  Surely people have been looking for answers for all of those years and nothing seems to surface which supplants a known side effect to Zoloft as having been the greatest cause of Carly's choice.

        Recently this corner has witnessed in others the capabilities of the altered human mind in ways that cannot be anticipated until they're right there in front of us.  Bizarre thought processes and logic just taking a mind once trusted right down a path toward the unknown.  This not of the permanent variety but of the temporary sort, which makes them in ways even more puzzling.  

        When viewed through a larger lens, these same witnessed temporary-yet-bizarre thought processes do help one to conceive of an unplanned, unconsented avenue which may so easily have steered Carly Henley toward her final moments.  With that in mind it is only now that this observer is comfortable about more fully writing-off Carly Henley's last fews days of life as not belonging to the "her" which seems to be her life and YouTube image.

        Nobody wants to sully their own long-crafted image of  Carly Henley by holding her final days against her, yet while pondering her death, no doubt many were wondering whether they should do just that from a logical standpoint.

        The truth is - the human mind can be impacted by lots of things already within the human body naturally, and when outside substances of various sorts are introduced, there is wide room for a variable that cannot always be predicted or anticipated.  It feels so wrong and unfair when individuals near to us are directly impacted or lost to us by things most appropriate for actuarial science.

        Most of us take our Covid shot with the general understanding that significant reaction is rare, and that death as a reaction is incredibly rare.  Yet we see in the media that some random individual died as the direct result of a Covid shot, but that human is almost always far removed from us...   until it isn't.

        It still seems that Carly Henley's death, likely as a function of her reaction to Zoloft, was one of those far-away statistics which still got way too near to us... even those of us who had never even heard of Carly while she was living.

        Remembering Carly Danielle Henley on what would be her 32nd birthday.

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