Tag: suicide

“Una puerta se abre” por Adolfo Bioy Caseras

Almeyda considers suicide through internal dialogue that evokes the struggle to weigh life-sustaining alternatives against death. His contemplation turns surreal in an encounter with the idea that “time heals everything” and the possibility to sleep for 100 years. Theme throughout the story is that even in the darkest moments, there are options and opportunities to overcome life’s challenges. The final twist, with the reappearance of a key character, emphasizes that love and human connection can overcome even the most desperate times, making clear that suicide is not reasonable or desirable. 10 pages, upper intermediate readers; Argentinian dialect. Useful for a Latin American literature course.

Esto es lo que sientes cuando tienes depresión

Barbara Stepko details the experience of five people with depression. One of these is Nita Sweeney. As a child, Nita felt that she lived with an immense melancholy that prevented her from functioning. These feelings stayed with Nita throughout her professional years. Her grave feelings weighed on her until she made a plan to take her life. She was stopped by a call from her therapist. Because of this professional, Nita spent time in the hospital and used writing, running, and medications to stabilize herself. Useful for community groups to discuss stigma of seeking help for mental illness.

The Hidden Dying of Doctors: What the Humanities Can Teach Medicine and Why We All Need Medicine to Learn It

This review of Kalanithi’s “When breath becomes air” focuses most on the opening story of a young colleague who took his own life, the problem of medical student and physician suicide/ depression/burnout, and how humanities education could alleviate the suffering of doctors by connecting them with the human side of medicine, their own and that of patients. This is very useful as a first-week reading in a Foundations of Health Humanities course or as a reference for a talk to aspiring med students