Tag: suicide

What happens when ordinary people play God to strangers? Leora Smith explores the history of one of the oldest art installations at Burning Man and the conversations that unfold there.

The life-long writer, teacher, and activist believed she could save a piece of land or a species, but after her brother took his life, she questioned her optimism and how to grieve for him and the planet.

“We no longer understand it here. We don’t trust it.”

“I got home and went back to the fetal position for a week.”

“After Lathrop died, I could not bring myself to delete his phone number.”

Grieving the mysterious death of her father, Susanna Space seeks refuge in the study of meteors.

Therapist Ursula Whitehead regularly texts her clients between sessions to help them understand that they are not alone.

After years of feeling hopeless and barely human, one talented writer manages to find her will to live.

One woman reconciles with her father’s death on her family’s property.

What can you do for a loved one with depression? Sometimes presence can make all the difference in the world.

After suicides and heartbreak ravage her family, Jenny Aurthur finds she has no choice but be transformed.

On a whirlwind book tour, Monica Drake fights to resist the pull of an emotional — and physical — abyss.

Gayle Brandeis takes two trips to Sin City with her mother — one while her mother is delusional.

An 18-year-old Parisian woman streams her suicide on social media.

Vietnam Veteran Ray Cocks, who’d eagerly enlisted in 1967, was forever changed by the realities of war.

Christine Hyung-Oak Lee reflects on seeing and “being seen” — the silent gift of bearing witness to one another and individual suffering as a way of offering comfort and hope.

At Broadly, Gabby Bess — a writer who has depression — interviews life-long sufferer Daphne Merkin, and reviews Merkin’s new memoir, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning With Depression.

What can haunted houses and their history tell us about American history and culture? Writer Colin Dickey sets out across America to investigate America’s haunted spaces in order to uncover what their ghost stories say about who we were, are, and will be.

In the wake of a troubled ex-lover’s suicide, novelist Masha Hamilton tries to make sense of it in a correspondence to his ghost.

In the literary magazine Post Road, Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about how her grandmother ─ a smart, talented woman born in repressive times ─ committed suicide for unclear reasons.

You don’t know what it’s like to be an emergency services provider until you’ve stood in the piss-soaked bedroom of a house and watched a team of medics try to revive an old, lonely guy though 15 minutes of automated CPR. It’s a small part of the job, but unavoidable. When the call goes off […]

All reporters have pieces that stay with them, stories whose characters and components linger long after the last revisions have been rendered and the paper put to bed. For Jennifer Mendelsohn, Sean Bryant was that character. Mendelsohn first encountered Sean Bryant shortly after his death, nearly two decades ago. Transfixed by his short, vivid life and subsequent suicide, […]

Jennifer Mendelsohn | Washingtonian | June 1998 | 36 minutes (8,995 words) Jennifer Mendelsohn is the “Modern Family” columnist for Baltimore Style magazine. A former People magazine special correspondent and Slate columnist, her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Washingtonian, Tablet, Medium, McSweeney’s and Jezebel. This story first appeared in the June […]

Back in the 1970s, as part of his own research, Shneidman asked a group of men at a union hall, “If you were going to commit suicide, what would you write?” The union hall experiment was, by contemporary research standards, ethically ambiguous at best. “You couldn’t do that today,” Pestian says. But the notes turned […]

In the Tampa Bay Times, Leonora LaPeter Anton examines the suicide of one of her sources, a woman named Gretchen Molannen who was suffering from an embarrassing genital arousal disorder. Was there anything Anton could have done to prevent the death?

A Minnesota school district enacts a policy designed to stop teachers from discussing or acknowledging homosexuality. Gay students report bullying, but administrators do nothing. The result is a string of suicides that has shaken the community: Sam’s death lit the fuse of a suicide epidemic that would take the lives of nine local students in […]

On the death of Tyler Clementi, a gay Rutgers student, and the charges against his roommate, Dharun Ravi, who used a webcam to spy on him. Clementi took his own life shortly after the incident: An online video chat, using an application like iChat or Skype, starts like a phone call: one person requests a […]