Tired of Cursing the Darkness

 

I'm beginning a series of posts here analogous to my annual "Any Good News?" offerings, a series in which I introduce or describe organizations that are actually trying to make good news. Some of these entries will discuss sensitive subjects like suicide or abortion, but it is hard to be a helper while avoiding the hard facts of life. Your humble narrator will provide donation links for those willing to lend a hand, financially speaking.

 

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Herewith the obligatory PSA: if you or someone you know is in dire distress, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 800/273-8255.

 

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One of my writing instructors in college admonished me never to joke about two subjects: AIDS, and suicide. Neither, he said, was ever funny. I think he was almost entirely right, but also that he had never seen the movie Heathers (1988), probably the best teen-angst picture of the 1980s. Michael Lehmann’s film mocked not suicide itself but the risible culture of suicide prevention, which in the Reagan era seemed to consist of empty admonitions masking adult indifference to young people’s suffering.

Among the laudable goals of Active Minds, a Philadelphia-based foundation with 1,000 local chapters around the United States, is to change the culture that Heathers effectively (if excessively) satirized. In the 2020s we are far likelier to recognize self-harm and suicide, particularly in young people, as signs not of spoiled self-indulgence but of treatable illness. The founders of Active Minds want to normalize conversations about mental illness, particularly on college and high-school campuses, using peer advocates, displays of empty backpacks (symbolizing the devastating impact of suicide on social networks), and a slogan, “The World Needs You Here,” that is far less vapid that “Teenage Suicide - Don’t Do It!” 

 

It is certainly a healthier and more constructive approach than that of my alma mater and other so-called elite institutions: identifying badly depressed students and turfing them out before they become a potential legal liability. If we believe that a university or high school is the sum of its students, and not the details of its balance sheet, then Active Minds’ mission - making sure that students stay alive both in and out of school - is more consistent with the purpose of higher education.    

 

Image via the Harvard Crimson, ironically enough.

Active Minds' donations page is here.