Suicide

Clancy Martin lives with two incompatible ideas in his head: "I wish I were dead – and I'm glad my suicides failed." He says he wrote his book especially for people struggling with suicidal thoughts.

Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicide have risen in recent years. NY Times reporter Matt Richtel says we lack the therapists and treatment centers to care for teens who are suffering.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., asked Raskin to serve as the lead manager in the second impeachment trial of President Donald Trump. Looking back now, Raskin sees Pelosi's request as a lifeline. He has a new memoir.

For much of his life, humorist John Moe has dealt with clinical depression that's triggered by stress. Now, faced with the COVID-19 crisis, he says, "my depression wants to flare up."

Allison Moorer's talks about coming to terms with the murder-suicide of her parents when she was 14, over thirty years ago, and how music helped.

In the second half of our two-part interview, Stern talks about his 2017 cancer scare, his thoughts on retirement and his mother's depression. His new book is Howard Stern Comes Again.

Sigrid Nunez's National Book Award-winning novel is narrated by a woman grieving the suicide of her longtime friend and former writing professor, whom she slept with once.

As a criminal justice reporter for the Houston Chronicle, Keri Blakinger has a special interest in covering the conditions of prisoners — in part because she spent nearly two years locked up in county and state correctional facilities herself.

Dave Itzkoff examines Williams' life and death in a new biography. Williams took his own life in 2014; an autopsy later revealed he had Lewy body dementia.

Growing up as a first-generation Chinese-American in Northern California, novelist Amy Tan found herself pulled by two different notions of fate: Her mother was guided by beliefs in curses and luck, while her father, a Baptist minister, was guided by Christian faith.

A genuine and funny comic, Chris Gethard talks about how he decided to bring his struggle with depression and suicide into his comedy act, and how improv changed his life.

Point-of-view is passed like a baton among the tortured main characters in Joachim Trier's new film. Critic David Edelstein says Louder than Bombs is intimate, touching and "insistently alive."

Comic Louie Anderson has had a hugely successful stand-up career for the last 30 years, but he admits he wasn't a very good actor early on. "I didn't know who I was or how to do it," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

In his new memoir, Philip Connors writes about "living in the shadow of suicide." Wracked by guilt and haunted by what-ifs, Connors investigated his brother's death and learned a terrible secret.

Despite being the daughter of a child psychologist and self-help author, Jessica Lamb-Shapiro has spent most of her life recoiling from the self-help industry. But eventually, her curiosity got the best of her. She tells Fresh Air about self-help's high- and low-brow iterations and the ways the industry helped her address her fears.

Few topics are off-limits for the brash comedian: She has joked about her many face lifts, her husband's suicide, her bankruptcy and the sacrifices she made as a female performer. The documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work follows the comedian as she fights to still make people laugh.

Vic Chesnutt was paralyzed from the waist down at the age of 18, but he's still a massively productive songwriter. Chesnutt has fifteen albums under his belt and his songs have been covered by Madonna, Smashing Pumpkins, and R.E.M. His new album, At The Cut, is a collaboration with Guy Picciotto of the band Fugazi. (

Army Major General Mark Graham lost two sons who were serving in the military, one by suicide, and the other died when a roadside bomb exploded in Iraq. Graham was struck by the different ways his sons' deaths were regarded. He has since enacted measures to ensure that all soldiers from the base he commands in Fort Carson, Colo. receive full military funerals and memorial services, regardless of whether they died in combat or by their own hand.

The latest novel from best-selling English author Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down, focuses on a group of suicidal people who accidentally meet atop a tall building — and how that meeting changes their fates. He also writes "Stuff I've Been Reading," a column for The Believer magazine. Many of Hornby's novels have been made into films, including About a Boy, High Fidelity and Fever Pitch.

Vilar's memoir "A Message from God in the Atomic Age" chronicles three generations of self-destructive behavior: in 1954, her grandmother was imprisoned for opening fire at the U.S. House of Representatives; in 1977, her mother leapt to her death from a speeding car; and in 1988, Vilar herself was committed to a psychiatric hospital after attempting suicide. Alternating between her notes from the psychiatric ward and the chronicling of the history of her family, Vilar tells of her own attempts to come to terms with her family history.