Suicide. Just say the word, and conversation halts. It’s perhaps the last taboo. It’s also sudden. Tragic. Violent. But preventable? And that in claiming 31,655 lives in 2002, suicide is a ...
Author Archive
Clinician risk
How much should clinicians do to protect suicidal patients – and themselves? After reading Waking Up: Climbing Through the Darkness, by suicide attempt survivor Terry Wise, clinician and ...
Thomas Joiner
Why people die by suicide When he was only 39 years old, suicide researcher and survivor Thomas E. Joiner, PhD attained significant success in a brief 10-year career. He is a recipient of the ...
States seeking services
Moving from planning to action in suicide prevention is no easy task. Yet Mike Hogan would like to pick up the pace. “We’re stuck. It’s like we’re in a car and we’re going 35 miles per hour,” ...
Judy Collins on loss
Dispersing stigma American folk singer Judy Collins is dispelling the stigma of suicide through song, speaking engagements and inscribing the story of her only son’s self-inflicted death. Her ...
Male frailty
If you’re male, you’re at higher risk for suicide. That’s a fact. Equality of the sexes doesn’t exist when it comes to suicide. That’s because men are four times more likely to die by suicide ...
Call to action
What can crisis interventionists and other civilians involved in suicide prevention do to better understand and assist veterans and their families? First, they can ask if military service ...
Stressors can overwhelm
After the terrorist events of Sept. 11, 2001, Americans can perhaps better grasp the lingering mental effects of feeling under siege, of having personal safety threatened by fear-provoking ...
Partner to ease pain
She’s an accountant by training, but Tara Barton was called on in February 2004 to reach someone who was acutely suicidal. The person in crisis was the wife of a member of the New Mexico National ...
High cost of service
Some reflections from those who lost loved ones who served in the military to suicide: THE FRIEND: Thomas Cook, 35 “I believe he never left Vietnam in his head because he always talked ...