Bob CollinsThe world has long been full of people who delight in yelling ‘jump’ when someone is perched on a building or bridge, preparing to die.
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MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Tag: Suicide
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 →
The Fargo Forum is getting some pushback from its community after it reported the results of an autopsy of the popular owner of a West Fargo diner. Read more →
The Toronto Star faced an unusual ethical dilemma when Raveena Aulakh left instructions that the paper should not write about her death.
She took her own life in late May.
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There are plenty of grown adults who object to the idea of telling kids they’re special.
Tell it to Brittni Darras, a 25-year-old high school teacher in Colorado. Read more →
Want to see what courage looks like? This is what courage looks like. It’s Morgan Hubbard of West Des Moines, sharing her story of her journey with depression. She graduates from high school today. Read more →
On Wednesday evening at Chanhassen High School, the Chaska Hawks baseball team defeated the Chanhassen Storm 1-0.
Any game that ends 1-0 is quite a game but it was quite a tribute from the kids on both teams that people will long remember, because they long remembered Ethan Herman, who would have been a senior this year had he not taken his own life in 2010. Do the math on that. He was just 12 years old. 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.
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The decision to shutter Al Jazeera America recently was met with a general shoulder shrug. It was hard to find the channel on cable TV. It was easy to find its website, but not enough people were interested in finding it. Read more →
Experts on suicide have generally succeeded in tamping down public talk about suicide by the nation’s school children. But Dan and Wanda Lienemann of Waukee, Iowa think there’s a better way to prevent the kind of thing that happened to their 18-year-old son. Read more →
I don’t know if you can see the video of what happened around Keller Park last night, Facebook settings being what they are and all, but it was a pretty astounding statement that a man who took his own life last fall mattered, and his loss is a loss for us all. Read more →
It was an awful tragedy in Dallas this week when Patti Stevens, 54, took her own life, two weeks after a mentally ill former Texas A&M football player hacked her husband to death with a machete while he was out for an early-morning jog.
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Anyone with a loved one with mental illness will recognize the pain that Sedaris tenderly describes. Read more →
The Associated Press stylebook, the bible of newswriting, is announcing several changes and additions this week at a convention of copy editors. Most of them are of little consequence; you can now write BLT on first reference in a news story, for example. But the AP’s directive on suicide is another matter altogether. In its Read more →