Chad Varah

An Anglican priest, Varah conducted his first funeral at the St. Peter-in-Eastgate church in Lincoln, England, in 1935 -- for a 13-year-old girl who had committed suicide. "Little girl, I didn't know you, but you have changed the rest of my life for good," he said later: he decided to concentrate on helping those contemplating suicide. By the 1950s he learned that there were three suicides a day in London, so in 1953 he founded The Samaritans (now simply called Samaritans) in London, the world's first crisis hotline service, offering non-religious telephone aid to people contemplating suicide. It has since grown to 202 branch offices in the U.K. staffed by more than 15,000 volunteers. The idea went international when Varah founded Befrienders International in 1983, which now operates in more than 40 countries. The 13-year-old girl had committed suicide because she thought she had a shameful disease; in reality, she had simply reached menarche. Varah thus fought his entire life for "well-informed" sex education, which made prudes call him "a 'dirty old man' by the time I was 25," he once said. He ignored the critics and kept at it: in 1992, with the influx of East Africans to England, he founded MAGMOG -- Men against Genital Mutilation of Girls. Dr. Varah didn't retire until he was 92, and he died November 8 at 95. From This is True for 4 November 2007 Suggestions for further reading: Dialectical Behavior Therapy with Suicidal Adolescents by Alec L. Miller PsyD, Jill H. Rathus Phd, Marsha M. Linehan Phd ABPP Amazon Price: $34.56 Customer Review: This book is a great adjunct to anyone interested in DBT. Not that it should be used instead of Marsha's original, but this one could be considered more of a condensed and easier to read version. The book itself is very well written to the point th...   Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism by Robert Pape Amazon Price: $10.88 Customer Review: Now that Tamil war is over, who else is doing suicide attacks other than Islamic bombers? Nobody. Also, if suicide attacks are all about removing occupying forces, please explain the spate of Taliban attacks in Pakistan in fall 2009. This book's argu...   Death and the King's Horseman (Norton Critical Editions) by Wole Soyinka Amazon Price: $10.65 Customer Review: Be sure to read the author's note, because if you don't, you might take it as an East vs. West, colonial vs. tribal, new vs. old story as it would appear on first reading. But in his note, Soyinka states that the "threnodic essence" of the work is a ...   Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Ou... by Kate Bornstein Amazon Price: $11.53 Customer Review: Truthfully, I don't know that this is the first book I would hand to an unhappy teenager. As sweet and full of love and pain and adorable gimmicks as it is, there's some pretty rough advice for someone with limited foresight to be taking seriously. S...   How I Stayed Alive When My Brain Was Trying to Kill Me: One Person's Guide to... by Susan Rose Blauner Amazon Price: $9.88 Customer Review: Like others here, this book saved my life. I found it quite by accident when I went to a bookstore to take my daughter. I had been having suicidal ideation for several months at this point. I felt like I was in this black hole everywhere I went --...   Newsfeed display by CaRP

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