I wasn’t going to do the Overnight Walk again.  Not after walking in memory of my dad in last year’s American Foundation for Suicide Prevention “Out of the Darkness” 18-mile overnight fundraising walk in San Francisco.  Once felt like enough, especially after the stunning outpouring of support from friends, family, and even people I didn’t [...]

It’s exceedingly rare that I can’t put a book down, but Gregory Martin’s  extraordinarily honest, heartfelt, brave, and beautifully written memoir held my attention from the first page to the last.

Those of us who have been through the suicide of a loved one can easily forget that an attempted suicide, like a completed suicide, [...]

Sometimes prosecutors and juries get it wrong.  Fortunately, the judge presiding over the trial of Dharun Ravi got it right.  Walking a very fine line in a case that fired passions on all sides, Judge Glenn Berman made the distinction “between behavior that society would call criminal versus behavior that society would call despicable,” as [...]

On Friday, March 30, the Star-Ledger in New Jersey published a column I wrote about blame in the aftermath of suicide as it relates to the Tyler Clementi-Dharun Ravi case.  You can read the column here (it follows after the jump) or you can click here for a link to the Star-Ledger, where you’ll [...]

Jennifer Hubbard’s terrific new young adult novel, TRY NOT TO BREATHE, explores depression and suicide through the eyes of sixteen-year-old Ryan, who is “fresh out of a mental hospital and trying to figure out how to reboot his life after a suicide attempt” and Nicki, a teenaged girl who is struggling to understand her [...]

Forty-one years ago, just a week after my dad killed himself, his best buddy arrived on our doorstep to repossess a portrait he’d painted of my father.  Howard handed me a toy football, took the painting from the wall, and walked out of our lives.  In 2006, after years of searching for Howard and the [...]

Men grieve differently.  I know that.  But still I was surprised when I found myself acting like a typical guy following my sister-in-law’s 2008 suicide.  A few months after I joined a writing class in the winter of 2010, I wrote a third-person story about that experience–about a man who hacks down a row of [...]

The Defense of Marriage Act, which requires the federal government to recognize only marriages between one man and one woman, is indefensible is so many ways.  However, the consequent lack of health insurance among gay couple dependents—and the resulting diminished access to affordable mental health care and inevitable increased number of suicides—makes DOMA unconscionable.

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