Now the goddamned holiday season is upon us once again, and with it the myth that suicides increase disproportionately to the rest of the year. Untrue, according to official reports. But it’s easy to buy into the rumors because the undue stress of being forced to be jolly (or else) is just too much for some of us to falsely smile our way through and so our thoughts turn dark. For many years, my holiday motto—a joke born of a kernel of truth-- has been this: Move over turkey, and make room in that oven for my head. I have contemplated suicide roughly one bazillion times in my life. This is a tricky one to talk about, because invariably, to bring up the topic even in a clinical manner is to invite over concern on the part of friends who begin to worry if you’re dropping hints of some imminent jump off the planet and into the ether. But I hold that few, if any of us, have escaped contemplating this particular end, if only for a moment or two. So let’s talk about it. more ›