US whistleblower and former US Army soldier Chelsea Manning tried to commit suicide for a second time last month, according to her lawyers.
Manning, 28, attempted suicide after she was sentenced to 14 days in solitary confinement in September, her punishment for a previous attempt to end her life in July.
The transgender former Army intelligence analyst was born Bradley Manning. She is serving a 35-year sentence for espionage after leaking archives of secret documents to WikiLeaks.
Chase Strangio, an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawyer representing Manning, confirmed the attempt. He had predicted that putting Manning in solitary confinement could exacerbate her problems.
Strangio said his client has endured a long series of “demoralizing and destabilizing assaults on her health and her humanity.”
Dr. Stuart Grassian, a psychiatrist who is a specialist in the psychiatric effects of solitary confinement, said it was a mistake by the US military to place fragile people with mental illness in solitary confinement.
After her conviction in 2014, she announced that she wanted to be known as Chelsea Manning and referred to by female pronouns.
In response to a federal lawsuit that accused the military of refusing to adequately treat her gender dysphoria, the military began letting her receive hormone therapy, but it still houses her with male inmates and does not let her grow her hair.
In early 2010, she leaked classified information to WikiLeaks, which made her a hero to open-government activists.
She disclosed diplomatic cables from American embassies around the world, incident logs from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, intelligence dossiers about Guantánamo Bay detainees and a video of a helicopter airstrike in Baghdad in which two Reuters journalists were killed.