My Business On Purpose

Sitting in a room listening to a variety of presentations, most of them non-engaging with slides that looked like this.  HUH? Then a physician stands up and begins to relay a series of statistics accompanied by stories. The suicide attempts among college girls have increased from 1% to 2%...a 100% increase in a 2-year span.  Nearly 1 in 3 girls have contemplated suicide.  We have a college-aged daughter and two college-aged sons…this woke me up.  After the presentation, I waited until the presenter was finished shaking hands and walked over into a quiet corner where he was refreshing coffee and asked, “What happened?” His response, in paraphrase…” it is well documented that there is a two-year reversal in behavior among HS and college students in general…so instead of an 18-year-old dealing with 18-year-old things, you have an 18-year-old who is developmentally 16, trying to deal with 28-year-old things because of the unfiltered availability of information.” Thirty years ago, a small subsection of people in t