My first experience with mental health stigma

As a kid, you’re not very good at expressing your emotions. Typically, when you’re still in elementary school or younger, strong emotions “come out” via physical pain. Things like headaches, stomach aches, nausea, excessive scratching, pulling out hair, etc. So when I was in 4th grade, somewhere around 8 or 9 years old, I was […]

Reaching Out

Time for a short personal story. My husband is a great man. That’s a big part of the reason why I married him. He too has a heart for youth and he volunteers consistently at our church with the junior & senior high school students. He puts in many hours of “behind the scenes” work […]

Bullying and Suicide

I’ve found myself becoming more and more sensitive to bullying in the past couple of months. It grew from just an annoyance that it happens, to a righteous fury, to being completely unable to watch movies/shows that depict bullying because I can’t stand the fact that bullying still exists. A few months ago I watched […]

The Werther Effect

About a year or two ago I made a post about something called the Werther effect, and I feel its a good time to bring it up again. The Werther Effect is named after a novel written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. This novel outlined the journeys of a young man who eventually died by suicide. […]

Tattling vs. Reporting

“Don’t squeal — unless it’s a big deal!” So, as things with Please Live are beginning to become more regular and we’re now operating as an official nonprofit, my hope is that blog posts will become more frequent as well.  You may have noticed that we have switched our blog over to wordpress. This is […]

Valentines Day

And so it is February, the month of pink and red and Valentines. There are two strong feelings surrounding this month. First is obviously the month to celebrate the relationship you’re in. If you find yourself lucky enough to have a significant other, then February is a time that you can really show them how […]

New Years

Instead of writing the usual January new-year new-beginnings type post, I want to talk about something that’s been on my mind lately. And that is the internet. Being only 22 years old, I understand the importance of the internet in the life of a teenager. For some older adults, the importance and significance is hard […]

Holidays

Hello everyone, First things first, an organizational update: Please Live has been diligently working on building our foundation as a nonprofit for the past two years now. Over the course of 2012 we really amped up our progress in finalizing our Board of Directors and four committees with a solid base of volunteers (but we’re […]