Jun 26, 2018
I “met” our next guest virtually on Twitter. The past two weeks, I—like many others—have been talking about suicide on Twitter, after the untimely deaths of both Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain. I wrote a Twitter thread about #SuicideFacts in response to my own frustration that suicide is a public health epidemic that we virtually ignore. . . except every time one of the 123 people per day who kills themselves is a celebrity. And if something positive can come from their deaths, it’s the fact that it at least raises the topic of suicide prevention to the top of our news cycles, at least for the next couple of days.
Laura Marshall is an incredible woman I met through Twitter when she opened up about her experiences with depression and how she attempted suicide. . .twice. She has a background as a broadcast journalist who then turned to public relations practice in the government and healthcare realms; she says this helps inform both her teaching and her research. Laura says that she knows she hasn’t “conquered” depression, because “it’s there in the shadows all the time”. She is here because she feels strongly that if anything she says can help any of our listeners—either who are suffering themselves or who know someone is may be—she wants to do it.