News and Happenings

Season 2 Finale! We started this season on a bridge but told you not to get caught up in the romantic notion of saviors and last minute interventions. Suicide isn’t about one moment in time. But if you or someone you love is suicidal, a single moment can be the difference between life and death. So, this week we’re doing a toolkit episode all about crisis response. What do you do when help is needed right now? This week, we role play with a suicide hotline employee, give the Cliff’s notes version of QPR suicide prevention training, and hear about what happens when therapists go on strike.

Did you know 1 in 4 suicides involve alcohol? Some studies actually place it closer to 40%. Where is the line between having a drink to decompress and getting black out drunk because you don’t want to exist? This week, we talk to Ana Marie Cox and Air Britt, about how alcohol helped them feel comfortable in their own skin…until it didn’t anymore. How do you go from waking up wanting to die, to feeling grateful every day that you’re still here?

This week, Stephanie and Jackie are switching roles to answer a simple question: Was I a suicidal teen girl? We start in a closet, revisit a high school therapist, talk to a self-injury expert and watch a tortured student film festival entry. And crying. There’s lots of crying.

It turns out, there’s more to suicide prevention than crisis hotline numbers and inspirational memes. This week, we’re looking at the concept of upstream intervention – because the most effective way to convince someone to live is to help them create a life worth living. We explore the toll of historical trauma for American Indians and Alaska Natives, communities currently experiencing an unprecedented rise in suicide while also coping with some of the highest rates of COVID infection in the country.

This week we’re talking about ACEs – aka – Adverse Childhood Experiences. How do you move forward when there’s a lot of pain in your past? And how are you supposed to open up when you were raised not to air your dirty laundry?? We’re joined by WNBA superstar Chamique Holdsclaw who dealt with her parents addiction early on and Music Industry Exec Mike Heyliger who talks about navigating his LGBTQ identity in an abusive home. We also speak with our favorite mental health and addiction expert, Dr. Nzinga Harrison, and The Trevor Project’s Michele Giordano about trauma and the affordability barrier disproportionately facing Black LGBTQ+ youth when seeking mental health care.

Imagine you’re six months pregnant with your first child and the person you love, the person with whom you’ve built a life, wakes you up in the middle of the night convinced there are people in the house. But…there aren’t. He’s convinced you’re being followed. But…you’re not. Where do you turn for help when your mental health crisis is invisible? Jenny Heddin took her husband to the emergency room only to find they weren’t equipped to handle their crisis. Like millions of Americans, they were turned away because there wasn’t an available bed. This week, we hear her story and are joined by our producer, Jackie Danziger, to talk about bed shortages, parity laws and psychiatric boarding.

What’s the point of going to treatment if you’ve essentially been dealt a death sentence? That’s the way some veterans feel about a potential PTSD diagnosis. Another thing holding people back? The fear that their trauma isn’t bad enough. So how do you admit you need help? And where do you turn when you’re ready? This week we’re joined by Jason Kander who served as an intelligence officer in Afghanistan, Tara Consolino, Director of Suicide Prevention and Substance Use Disorders at the Detroit V.A., and Rajeev Ramchand, a psychiatric epidemiologist with the RAND Corporation, to talk about what happens when your symptoms don’t look like the ones in the movies.

Description Happy Thanksgiving! This week, we’re re-airing our very first episode of Last Day from Season One. In it, we meet host Stephanie Wittels Wachs, sister of the late Harris Wittels, comedian-writer-producer-actor, who died in 2015 of a heroin overdose....

After losing a loved one to suicide, “why” is often the first question that comes to mind. But what if you had a meticulous case file that filled in the blanks? This week, we talk to Sharon Kritzer, her older sister Noa, and their mom, Batia, about their sister Tali, her chronic depression, and the documentation she left behind that outlined all of it. We also call up Janis Whitlock from Jed, who talks to us about the potential downsides of being your own lead investigator.

They don’t get a lot of attention, but seniors are the most at risk to die by suicide. In 2014, Marguerite Reynolds lost her fiercely independent mother to suicide after a cornea injury left her feeling burdensome and debilitated. This week, we hear her story and are joined by professor and researcher, Yeates Conwell, who unpacks “The Four D’s” that put seniors at an increased risk for suicide. And Stephanie has an uncomfortable – but very important – conversation with her dad.