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You asked this question two days ago and I apologize for taking some time to respond, but I wanted to reflect on it and answer it from a truthful, honest place rather than quickly rush out a response.
If I was approached by a student who was suicidal, I would immediately put them in contact with people who are in a position to help - our guidance office, our school nurse and of course, his or her parents. Schools have a whole system in place for this kind of thing and my tendency is to rely on those systems to give students the best help they could receive. I’m not a doctor or a psychologist.
However… I suspect what you might be asking is how I would deal with it “in the moment” rather than the chain of command I’m compelled to go through by my position.
I had a miserable time in high school. Or rather, I created miserable circumstances for myself and reacted to them in the most awful ways possible. I was suicidal. I spent some time in a hospital my senior year, dealing with those feelings. In a circumstance like the one you propose, I would explain I have intimate experience withe the feelings that student is going through and I would likely offer my perspective on them, along with the assurance that even though I work in a high school, even though I love my job as a teacher… I’m not naive. I know that for most of my students, high school sucks. I’d want them to know that life gets SO much better after high school, it’s amazing. It’s AMAZING.
…that’s what I do. Speaking frankly, that’s what I have done when I’ve had to counsel a teenager who’s dealing with those issues in a public way. Honestly though, if a student is expressing suicidal tendencies in a big, bad way… if a student is seeking help from me… I take that as a sign that deep down somewhere, they recognize they have a problem and they need help. I would endeavor to be as supportive as I could be and let the student know they are not alone in their experiences, while working to get them the help they need.
![More old sketchbook stuff: there will be at least one NEW comic next week, and many more in the weeks following.
As a regular viewer of the US Office, I was interested in checking out the series’ finale Thursday night. Most series finales suffer from an unavoidable overabundance of expectation and sentimentality, especially in situation comedies. It’s fairly rare for a sitcom to stick the landing on a final episode; even as a superfan of the UK Office, I realize the saccharine nature of that show’s wrap-up somewhat goes against the bleak tone set in the first two seasons.
So when I say aspects of last night’s finale didn’t work, it’s not entirely a failure on the part of The Office. It’s a failure of the nature of bringing long, sprawling narratives to an abrupt conclusion. Some of the episode’s sentimental moments were unearned and the show again plays fairly fast and loose with the nature of this weird documentary. Having said that… I’ve stuck with The Office through its’ first season. The show was appointment television for me when I was a lonely heart living in a weird one bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. If series’ finale’s often go for mawkish affection, I’m a primo target.
I’ll also say, I admire the darker steps the finale took, and here I’m going to get into spoilers so I’ll put the rest behind a cut.
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The US Office, while a brighter, more positive show than its’ British inspiration, could have done well to have more dark notes throughout the show’s nine year run. I’ve always contended that The Office should have ended with Dunder Mifflin going out of business due to the ineptitude of Kevin the accountant; I like that the show nodded at his stupidity with a sacking at the beginning of the episode. The end of the relationship between Kelly Kapoor and Ryan Howard was also fairly grim given those characters’ history. Those were notes I enjoyed in the middle of some of the more improbable “up” moments (Nellie just takes Ryan’s baby? Just like that? Erin meets her birthparents at a reunion and a day later they’re cutting a rug on the dance floor? It was a nice moment but… really? All is forgiven, just like that?).
Having said that, I thought the episode handled the sentimental moments quite well, especially the quick reintroduction of Steve Carell’s Michael Scott. Yeah, I’ll say it: I teared up a little to see Michael at the wedding. Greg Daniels’ made the right call in keeping the Michael stuff to an absolute minimum. Viewers have already had a fantastic farewell to Carell’s character and as an added bonus, by keeping Michael’s lines short and sweet, they gave his appearance more weight. The fact that Michael, so much a character who craved the spotlight, didn’t attend the documentary panel at the beginning of this episode, says something about how the character may have changed in the time between S.7 and the final episode. Very good job there.
The Jim and Pam stuff was something of a mess. My wife and I spent about ten minutes after the finale talking about what exactly it was that Athlead, Jim’s sports management brainstorm, actually does. Why is it located in Austin now? Didn’t the Athlead partners “sell” Athlead? What was that three month sales trip Jim couldn’t go on all about? If working at Athlead when it was a startup was such a big deal, how it it that Jim can “jump right back in” as Pam says at the end of the episode? Having said that, watching the final character moments for those two play out, I was reminded just how special the second and third season of The Office were in regards to that relationship. The writers’ willingness to “go for it” with Jim and Pam was great. On any other sitcom, viewers would have been strung along through nine seasons before those two would have gotten together. On The Office, J &P were allowed to come to their ultimate conclusion by the show’s fifth. If the writers felt like they needed this bump in the road to go out strong, I’m willing to allow it… as long as we can all recognize that the circumstances surrounding their marital woes was something of a MacGuffin.
And that’s really my feeling about the last episode. If some of those sentimental moments were unearned… well, I stand by that. A lot of them were the result of nine years of having these characters kicking around my television however and I’ll let it slide on my affection for them.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/207c7e375046b7fe91bbbe03101afce6/tumblr_mmxz4mkw5v1qaci6zo1_400.jpg)
