By Lynea Gillen Across the US and Canada, schools have been warning parents about the new Netflix series 13 Reasons Why and its handling of teen suicide. If you’ve been following the controversy, you’re familiar with the concerns – that it glorifies suicide, that it...
Emotional loss is part of the human condition and, though painful, is part of our growth into caring, compassionate adults. Grief is the process through which we heal. Many of us grow up without learning how to grieve in healthy ways, how to let go of the pain while...
Several years ago, the children in the 6th grade classroom I was visiting as a school counselor started to talk about the dangers in the world and how many “bad” people there were “out there.” I asked them to tell me more. They told me about stories from the news,...
It looks like schools aren’t the only place where exercise is getting the short shrift these days. According to new research out of Oregon State University, it’s largely absent from the medical school curriculum, too. Just over half of US medical schools offer no...
Within a day of last week’s shooting at Reynolds High School in Troutdale – just outside of Portland here and where some of Lynea’s colleagues work – several particular posts about it began cropping up on Facebook a lot. One was especially sad and sobering: Though...
A few years ago, after hearing news of another mass shooting, I sat with the principal of the rural elementary school where I worked as a counselor, feeling sad and discouraged. Then he said something I’ve never forgotten: “The children you save never make the...
