1. Welcome to SportsJournalists.com, a friendly forum for discussing all things sports and journalism.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register for a free account to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Access to private conversations with other members.
    • Fewer ads.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

Woody Paige on planning a suicide....his own.

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by 21, Sep 23, 2010.

  1. SoCalScribe

    SoCalScribe Member

    Takes guts to put all that out there. Good for him. There are lots of athletes who are dealing with depression and other demons but are afraid to ask for help, or just don't know how. Maybe just as the NFL has "suddenly" become aware of the effects of long-term brain damage, it seems that the sports world is warming to the idea of psychological help for athletes. It's great to see.
     
  2. WriteThinking

    WriteThinking Well-Known Member

    I would submit that this was probably the easiest column Paige ever felt compelled to write, not the hardest, and it probably wasn't tough at all.

    Besides the good statistical support and factual perspective, this came straight from inside. Those usually are the best, and easiest, things to write, precisely because you can relate to them so powerfully, and so personally.

    As for a couple other concerns/questions raised: I doubt that Paige was taking all those drugs at the same time, or that they were prescribed that way. The column says he was taking them over the course of the previous months. It doesn't say he took them together, or took all of them all the time.

    Also, there is no direct connection between Benedryl and diabetes. The former is simply a treatment for the low serotonin levels that may result from nutritional issues.

    And Kenny McKinley committed suicide not because he thought it was the only way out but because he wasn't really thinking at all at the time. He was feeling, only, and his loss of himself in his unimaginably powerful emotions caused him to lose perspective, on his problems, his feelings, and how permanent and irreversible death really is.
     
  3. Alma

    Alma Well-Known Member

    This section is, IMO, outstanding writing:

    <i>The last, desperate, despondent, despicable act was all planned out. The Broncos were playing on Sunday, Sept. 15, 2002, against the 49ers. I would fly into San Francisco the day before, drive up to Napa Valley, enjoy a bottle of expensive red wine and check into a nice inn. The next morning I would head over to the coast and swim out in the Pacific Ocean far enough that I couldn't make it back to the beach.

    My death would be termed an "accidental drowning," and my family and few friends would be horrified, but spared the humiliation.

    I figured out the details while laying on the sofa staring at the ceiling for hours, as I did daily, and swallowing the pills a prominent Denver psychiatrist had prescribed over a period of months — Prozac, Ritalin, Xanax, Valium, Ambien and Zoloft — and swilling Jack Daniel's.

    I had everything to live for, but wanted nothing more than to die.

    I was suffering from deep depression.

    Gil Whiteley, who is a brother to me and had a key to my place, showed up and said: "You've got to do something."

    I replied: "I'm going to San Francisco."

    Instead, he called my longtime friend and family doctor, Allen Schreiber (who also has been a physician for the Nuggets, the Avalanche and currently the Rockies), and shoved the phone in my face. "I have a problem, Allen."

    Dr. Schreiber checked me into a private room on the secured maternity floor at a Denver hospital. The nurses took away my pills, my belt, my razor and my fingernail clippers. ("I'm not about to clip myself to death.")

    That night Dr. Schreiber prescribed one red pill. "What is this?" I asked the nurse. "I'm addicted to a lot of medications."

    "Benadryl," she said.

    "But I don't have a runny nose."</i>
     
  4. Alma

    Alma Well-Known Member

    And he committed suicide because he had a gun. You can swim 30 yards into an ocean, have a moment of clarity, and turn back. Gun not so much. The gun aspect gets downplayed, but this rotten American culture makes suicide easier. I know a woman who runs a ever-growing group of grieving mothers. You don't even want to know how many of their sons died at the hands of a handgun - for "protection," of course - tucked somewhere in a four-bedroom house. Sons who may not have died if those guns weren't there.
     
  5. WriteThinking

    WriteThinking Well-Known Member

    This is an excellent point and I'm with you with regard to your feelings about guns, which I would have no problem with having completely outlawed.

    I've always thought it a bit ridiculous when gun proponents say, "Guns don't kill people; people kill people" (and themselves) as a result of having them.
     
  6. Mystery Meat II

    Mystery Meat II Well-Known Member

    There's plenty of quick ways to do yourself, if you were of a mind. Jump off something high. Walk in front of a speeding train. Toaster in the bathtub. Banning guns isn't going to make instant suicide impossible (nor do half of what anti-gun proponents think it'll do, but that's another argument for another board)
     
  7. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    Count me among those who believes that NOBODY should keep a gun at their house.

    For every person who uses it to get rid of a burglar, there are hundreds of suicides, accidental shootings etc. I had a high school football teammate who committed suicide after finding his father's gun on the day his girlfriend broke up with him. I also have a cousin who was shot by his stepfather because he thought he was a burglar.
     
  8. Big Circus

    Big Circus Well-Known Member

    Agree 100 percent. The last time I lived with friends before I got married, both had guns in the house...I was at home one day during the day when one roommate didn't expect anyone to be there. He heard me in my room and called out to me, but I didn't hear him. I opened the door a second later to a gun in my face (and profuse apologies a second later).

    Obviously, this isn't on the same level - not even in the same building - as suicides and accidental shootings. And if I recall correctly, the gun wasn't loaded. But that's a situation getting just SLIGHTLY out of control, and a gun owner that, for the most part, was responsible to the nth degree. There's just so, so much more that can go wrong.
     
  9. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    An editor who I knew a little last year killed himself. I hadn't seen him in over a decade, but the last time I was out with him he was bragging that he had bought a handgun to protect his family at a time when there were a lot of robberies in his neighborhood.

    I can't help but wonder how things would have been different if he didn't own that gun.
     
  10. nmmetsfan

    nmmetsfan Active Member

    Yes, let's blame deaths from mental illness on guns. Makes perfect sense.
     
  11. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    Obviously, nothing can prevent someone who is hell bent on killing himself from doing so. But it's a lot harder to use a gun if you don't already have a gun.
     
  12. novelist_wannabe

    novelist_wannabe Well-Known Member

    I wrote a story a few years back about the family of a man who committed suicide, and I've wondered the same thing -- how different their lives would be if there had not been ready access to guns. It was a heart-wrenching story, and they agreed to do it only out of the hope that someone would read it and reconsider suicide as an option.
     
Draft saved Draft deleted

Share This Page