Bob Collins
At far too young of an age, students in Renville are learning a painful lesson about life: Sometimes, depression leads people to take their own life. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Tag: Mental health
Acting on the advice of experts, schools have pretty well lowered the cone of silence on the issue of suicides by students. They’re worried that it will lead to a copycat syndrome.
So it’s shocking to learn, as we did via NPR today, that middle school suicides have reached an all-time high, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Read more →
This afternoon, Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek released a study showing half of the inmates at the Hennepin County jail would benefit from or are in need of mental health services. Read more →
Katie Schoener is going to be remembered and buried today in Scranton, Pa., and her family isn’t shy about the circumstances. Read more →
We won’t ever know what prompted a woman to let go of the fence. We won’t ever know what led her to crawl through the hole and to decide that the world she lives in offers no hope. We won’t determine whether the society that saved her, also failed her.
We think the story is over. Read more →
Two stories in the news today provide a foundation for more discussion on the state of mental health care in Minnesota. Read more →
Dejuan Quashon Montgomery is probably heading back to prison soon because he stole a 9-year-old girl’s cellphone. You might see it as a crime story. I see it as a health story. Read more →
Seldom have we seen the sort of must-read series (and a spectacular online component) that the Star Tribune is providing this week, starting yesterday. The paper is looking at one of the least-covered scandals in Minnesota and the rest of the country: the lack of knowledge on the part of police when it comes to answering calls involving the mentally ill.
Read more →
There’s still a chance, albeit somewhat slim, that the Minnesota Legislature will pass legislation to require an estimated 10,000 police officers in Minnesota to get four hours of training on how to respond to mental health calls. Read more →
She won an Oscar for her role as Helen Keller in ‘The Miracle Worker,’ but her legacy should be that she was also one of the first people to talk openly about her depression, which she did after she was diagnosed bipolar and tried to kill herself in the early ’80s. Read more →
I’ve written in this space before about the Facebook page of Kenyon police chief Lee Sjolander, whose writing reveals him as a philosopher, a healer, and counselor as well as being a cop. Read more →
In our growing collection, we’ve read plenty of powerful essays on the nature of mental health, depression, and suicide, but we’re hard pressed to recall one as powerful as that for Aletha Pinnow, who took her own life in Duluth last month.
Read more →
In the waning days of Black History Month, Debi Thomas should get a little attention for proving, as she did at the 1988 Olympics, that an African American can succeed at figure skating while acing college exams. Read more →
We don’t know exactly what happened inside a Roseville apartment overnight where a man having a mental health crisis was shot to death after stabbing a police dog.
But based on the information provided so far, it’s worth discussing whether there’s a more effective way to respond to these situations. Read more →
Since late January, a man in Superior, Wis., has been protesting the local school’s “de-escalation room”, a room where some of the school’s special needs students can go when things get tense for them. Read more →