Building Awareness Around Youth Suicide
Oh, why you look so sad
The tears are in your eyes
Come on and come to me nowDon’t be ashamed to cry
Let me see you through
Cause I’ve seen the dark side too- I’ll Stand By You, by the Pretenders (but YouTube of Carrie Underwood’s version because she’s awesome)
Yup, more stuff from the news:
Way over in Ottawa, back in November 2010, Daron Richardson took her own life… she was the 14-year old daughter of Ottawa Senators assistant coach Luke Richardson (pictured). Shortly after, Luke and his family decided to go public with the story in the hopes that by sharing their story, that it would encourage more people to talk about mental health and suicide, particularly with youth. And it did.
The entire Senators organization threw its backing behind the announcement and news of Daron’s suicide spread like wildfire in Ottawa, throughout the hockey community and here and there around the internet. A memorial Facebook page was created and quickly defaced by a gaggle of trolls… Others came calling because they had read about the story on Six Billion Secrets… And out of that clamour came a whisper: Do It For Daron. (we’re guessing “it” means “talk”) Now the folks at the Royal Ottawa Foundation for Mental Health have borrowed the phrase and will be holding the first annual “DIFD Youth Mental Health Awareness Night” on Feb. 26th, 2011 at their game that night. (more info)
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Now obviously we’re big fans of talking about suicide… frankly, we can’t shut up about it. And I appreciate that folks are definitely talking about it… look at #difd. I guess it’s just important to remember that there’s more to it than sharing the story of one girl.
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We can listen, too.
We can stop being afraid that letting someone talk about suicide will lead them to going through with it.
We can stop assuming that suicide is only about people who are crazy, weak, lol emo, depressed or otherwise f*#&ed up and realize that keeping all those feelings bottled up could eat any one of us up.
We can do our best to create a world where kids will see just by looking around that they don’t have to fix everything on their own… and that they can turn to the people around them when they are feeling that hopeless, without fear of judgement or anger.
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There… do all that for Daron.
