Survivors of suicide often feel completely alone in their sadness, which is quite understandable. Unlike losing a husband or child or parent to heart disease or cancer, loved ones of person who have committed suicide can’t express their grief publicly. As often as suicide happens – approximately 30,000 times a year in our country alone—the...

I’ve talked about Joshua Wolf Shenk before because his book, “Lincoln’s Melancholy,” was deeply inspiring to me back in Fall of 2005. I remember the exact moment in which I heard excerpts of it. I was sitting in my son’s preschool parking lot, crying, feeling so hopeless … so I called my mentor, Mike Leach,...

It is an honor for me to publish the following piece by Ronald Pies, M.D., professor of psychiatry at SUNY Upstate Medical University and Tufts University School of Medicine, because I find him to be one of the most fascinating psychiatrists in the Northern Hemisphere (I’m thinking the Southern is full of kooks). He always...

Cicero said that “gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.” The English preacher John Henry Jowett wrote that “every virtue divorced from thankfulness is maimed and limps along the spiritual road.” And according to Aseop Fables, “gratitude is the sign of noble souls.” A dear professor of...

On Veteran’s Day, I thought it was appropriate to site some statistics about veterans and mental health:   Almost one in three veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq confront mental health problems. On an average day in this country, suicide claims another 18 veterans. Approximately 30 percent of veterans treated in the veterans health system...