Bob CollinsThe Mental Health America media awards were announced last night. The pieces that won are worth looking at.
PBS won for Depression: Out of the Shadows, which was produced for WGBH in Boston and Twin Cities Public Television in Minnesota. Particularly compelling is the Faces of Depression section of the Web site.
National Public Radio won for a two-part series — Two Families Grapple with Sons’ Gender Preferences — which shows how two psychologists can have two entirely different views of the same symptoms.
And Newsweek magazine won for Growing Up Bipolar: Max’s World.
Max Blake was 7 the first time he tried to kill himself. He wrote a four-page will bequeathing his toys to his friends and jumped out his ground-floor bedroom window, falling six feet into his backyard, bruised but in one piece. Children don’t really know what death is, as the last page of Max’s will made clear: “If I’m still alive when I have grandchildren,” it began. But they know what unhappiness is and what it means to suffer.
