Month: April 2016

In all the years I have been a journalist, the hardest interview I had to conduct was with a mother who had just lost her 16-year-old daughter to suicide less than a week before we spoke. As the mother of young adults, I could feel her pain as she sobbed into the phone, having to relive the horrific tragedy as she shared the intimate details of her daughter’s struggles. When tragedy strikes, journalists are often first on the scene. And it’s difficult to understand how we choose to pry into people’s private lives. But Cathy Housh, the mother of the teen, didn’t hesitate to speak with me. She realized that we shouldn’t be afraid to talk about suicide and that getting this subject out into the open will ultimately help to save lives. In fact, she’s made it her mission to push for legislation that will create programs to prevent it. I knew that reporting about teen suicide would be a tough sell for a woman’s magazine. And I applaud Good Housekeeping for running my article,  in the April, 2016 issue. But it was a long journey, one that started when I turned in the first draft one-and-a-half years ago. Advertisers, the major source of revenue for magazines, typically don’t like to wrap their ads around an article focused on such a dark issue. Instead of the article being highlighted in the editor’s column as I hoped it would be, it was buried at the end of the magazine, surrounded by an ad for Clump and Seal cat litter and a promotion for heart medication. It would be ideal if the women’s magazines would give these kinds of meaty topics a higher profile. Still, it’s a start. And I feel gratified that my piece ran in a publication with a circulation of 24-million. It may be enough to get the word out about a tragedy that is becoming far too common among our teens.