Suicide Help

Today is the last day of National Suicide Prevention Week, but there is ALWAYS help available if you or someone you know needs it.  I have placed the number for the Suicide Prevention Lifeline in the middle of today's books, all about suicide.  Please do not hesitate to reach our for help - LIFE IS BETTER WITH YOU IN IT!

Brave Face: How I Survived Growing Up, Coming Out, and Depression by Shaun David Hutchinson - At nineteen, Hutchinson was struggling to find the vocabulary to understand and accept who he was and how he fit into a community in which he couldn't see himself. Convinced that he couldn't keep going, that he had no future, Hutchinson followed through on trying to make that a reality-- an attempted suicide. Over time, he came to embrace life, and to find self-acceptance. In his deeply honest memoir, he takes readers through the journey of what brought him to the edge, and what has helped him truly believe that it does get better.

Bruised & Wounded: Struggling to Understand Suicide by Ronald Rolheiser - When someone is stricken with cancer, one of three things can happen: Doctors treat the disease and cure it; professionals can't cure the disease but can control it so that the person suffering can live with the disease for the rest of his or her life; or the cancer can be of a kind that cannot be treated and all the medicine and treatments in the world are powerless - the person dies.
Emotional depression leading to suicide can work the same way. Sometimes a person can be treated so that, in effect, they are cured; sometimes they can't ever really be cured, but can be treated in a way that they can live with the disease for their whole life; and sometimes, just as with certain kinds of cancer, the disease is untreatable, unstoppable, and no intervention by anyone or anything can halt its advance - it eventually kills the person and there is nothing anyone can do. Thus, Ronald Rolheiser begins this small, powerful book.

Cracked, Not Broken: Surviving and Thriving After a Suicide Attempt by Kevin Hines - The Golden Gate Bridge is one of the most recognizable structures to define a modern city. Yet, for author Kevin Hines the bridge is not merely a marker of a place or a time. Instead, the bridge marks the beginning of his remarkable story. At 19 years old, Kevin attempted to take his own life by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge - a distance which took four seconds to fall. Recently diagnosed with bi-polar disorder, Kevin had begun to hear voices telling him he had to die, and days before his attempt, he began to believe them. The fall would break his body, but not his spirit. His story chronicles the extraordinary will of the author to live mentally well in the face of his mental illness: bipolar disorder with psychotic features. With each mental breakdown, however, the author's desire to live mentally well-- and to be a mental health advocate-- pulls him from the depths of his condition. Kevin's story is a remarkable testament to the strength of the human spirit and a reminder to us to love the life we have. His story also reminds us that living mentally well takes time, endurance, hard work, and support. With these disciplines in place, those living with even very difficult diagnoses can achieve better lives for themselves and those who help to support and care for them.

Dead Serious: Breaking the Cycle of Teen Suicide: A Book for Teens, Adults, & Educators by Jane Mersky Leder - My brother took his own life on his thirtieth birthday. My life has never been the same. Thirty plus years after publishing the first edition of Dead Serious, this second completely revised and updated edition covers new ground: bullying, social media, LGBTQ teens, suicide prevention programs, and more. Scores of teens share their stories that are often filled with hurt, disappointment, shame--yet often hope. Written for teens, adults and educators, Dead Serious: Breaking the Cycle of Teen Suicide explores the current cultural and social landscape and how the pressure-filled lives of teens today can lead to anxiety, depression--suicide. Leder's own journey of discovery after her brother's suicide informs her goal of helping to prevent teen suicide by empowering teens who are suffering and teens who can serve as peer leaders and connectors to trusted adults. The skyrocketing number of teens who take their own lives makes Dead Serious: Breaking the Cycle of Teen Suicide more relevant and important than ever.

The Girl Behind the Door: A Father's Quest to Understand His Daughter's Suicide by John Brooks - Early one Tuesday morning John Brooks went to his teenage daughter's room to make sure she was getting up for school and found her room dark and "neater than usual." Casey was gone but he found a note: The car is parked at the Golden Gate Bridge. I'm sorry.
Several hours later a security video was found that showed Casey stepping off the bridge.
Brooks spent months after Casey's suicide trying to understand what led his seventeen-year-old daughter to take her life. He examines Casey's journey from her abandonment at birth in Poland, to the orphanage where she lived for the first fourteen months of her life, to her adoption and life with John and his wife Erika in Northern California. He reads. He talks to Casey's friends, teachers, doctors, therapists, and other parents. He consults adoption experts, researchers, clinicians, attachment therapists, and social workers.
In The Girl Behind the Door, Brooks shares what he learned and asks "What did everyone miss? What could have been done differently?" He'd come to realize that Casey might have been helped if someone had recognized that she'd likely suffered an attachment disorder from her infancy--an affliction common among children who've been orphaned, neglected, and abused. This emotional deprivation in early childhood, from the lack of a secure attachment to a primary caregiver, can lead to a wide range of serious behavioral issues later in life.
John's hope is that Casey's story, and what he discovered since her death, will help others. This important book is a wakeup call that parents, mental health professionals, and teens should read.

Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide by Linda Gray Sexton - After the agony of witnessing her mother's multiple--and ultimately successful--suicide attempts, Linda Gray Sexton, daughter of the acclaimed poet Anne Sexton, struggles with an engulfing undertow of depression. Here, with powerful, unsparing prose, Sexton conveys her urgent need to escape the legacy of suicide that consumed her family--a topic rarely explored, even today, in such poignant depth.
Linda Gray Sexton tries multiple times to kill herself--even though as a daughter, sister, wife, and most importantly, a mother, she knows the pain her act would cause. But unlike her mother's story, Linda's is ultimately one of triumph. Through the help of family, therapy, and medicine, she confronts deep-seated issues and curbs the haunting cycle of suicide she once seemed destined to inherit.

Love You Like the Sky: Surviving the Suicide of a Beloved by Sarah Neustadter - Writing from the unique point of view of a suicide survivor who is also a psychologist, Sarah Neustadter presents a selection of the emails she sent to John, her deceased beloved, over a three-year period following his death. Documenting the raw emotions she experienced during this time period--grief, despair, abandonment, confusion, and the seductive feeling of wanting to die--she seeks to answer the hard existential and psychological questions: Why is this happening? What does this mean about mortality? How do I go on with the rest of my life without my beloved? How do I heal my broken heart? Will I ever love again? Love You Like the Sky is a companion guide and roadmap for supporting younger women and men through intense and complicated grief as an access point toward deeper transformation--shifting awareness from despair to beauty.

Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves by Jesse Bering - For much of his thirties, Jesse Bering thought he was probably going to kill himself. He was a successful psychologist and writer, with books to his name and bylines in major magazines. But none of that mattered. The impulse to take his own life remained. At times it felt all but inescapable.
 Bering survived. And in addition to relief, the fading of his suicidal thoughts brought curiosity. Where had they come from? Would they return? Is the suicidal impulse found in other animals? Or is our vulnerability to suicide a uniquely human evolutionary development? In Suicidal, Bering answers all these questions and more, taking us through the science and psychology of suicide, revealing its cognitive secrets and the subtle tricks our minds play on us when we're easy emotional prey. Scientific studies, personal stories, and remarkable cross-species comparisons come together to help readers critically analyze their own doomsday thoughts while gaining broad insight into a problem that, tragically, will most likely touch all of us at some point in our lives. But while the subject is certainly a heavy one, Bering's touch is light. Having been through this himself, he knows that sometimes the most effective response to our darkest moments is a gentle humor, one that, while not denying the seriousness of suffering, at the same time acknowledges our complicated, flawed, and yet precious existence.
 Authoritative, accessible, personal, profound--there's never been a book on suicide like this. It will help you understand yourself and your loved ones, and it will change the way you think about this most vexing of human problems.

Voices of Strength: Sons and Daughters of Suicide Speak Out by Judy Zionts Fox & Mia Roldan - Statistics show that there is one suicide every 16.1 minutes, and thus, six new survivors of that suicide every 16.1 minutes. In this deeply moving but also practical book, authors Judy Zoints Fox and Mia Roldan share the results of their survey of children of a parental suicide. Exploring the ways their lives have been affected and addressing the emotional, psychological, and physical effects, daughters and sons of all ages -- from children to adolescents to adults -- reveal their reactions. The authors link these responses to the insights of therapists, clergy, a criminal investigator, and others -- friends, classmates, work colleagues, relatives -- as they discuss what is helpful to suicide survivors and what is not. Voices of Strength helps survivors make sense of life's least understandable act and shows them how to heal by focusing on comfort, memories, recovery, and hopes for a productive future.

What Made Maddy Run: The Secret Struggles and Tragic Death of an All-American Teen by Kate Fagan - From noted ESPN commentator and journalist Kate Fagan, the heartbreaking and vital story of college athlete Madison Holleran, whose death by suicide rocked the University of Pennsylvania campus and whose life reveals with haunting detail and uncommon understanding the struggle of young people suffering from mental illness today. If you scrolled through the Instagram feed of 19-year-old Maddy Holleran, you would see a perfect life: a freshman at an Ivy League school, recruited for the track team, who was also beautiful, popular, and fiercely intelligent. This was a girl who succeeded at everything she tried, and who was only getting started. But when Maddy began her long-awaited college career, her parents noticed something was different. Previously indefatigable, Maddy became withdrawn, and her thoughts centered on how she could change her life. In spite of thousands of hours of practice and study, she contemplated transferring from the school that had once been her dream. When Maddy's dad, Jim, dropped her off for the first day of spring semester, she held him a second longer than usual. That would be the last time Jim would see his daughter. What Made Maddy Run began as a piece that Kate Fagan, a columnist for espnW, wrote about Maddy and her experience. What started as a profile of a successful young athlete whose life ended in suicide became so much larger when Fagan started to hear from other college athletes also grappling with mental illness. This is the story of Maddy Holleran and her struggle with depression, but it also reveals the mounting pressures young people, and college athletes in particular, face to be perfect, especially in an age of relentless connectivity and social-media saturation.