Recently I was watching a touching short film with a tense and dramatic suicide scene, and all I could think was “No, you fool! It’s down the highway, not across the road! You’ll muck it all up!”

She ended up not doing it, but it still bothers me that Hollywood (or in this case, a student at MTSU) is teaching our kids the wrong way to kill themselves. Suicide is an essential skillset that our schools just don’t teach, and parents seem to be avoiding the subject entirely. Movies and TV are the only way for children to learn essential suicide strategies, and if they teach it wrong, we’ll have a generation of “Girl, Interrupted”s.