(WTNH)–With the pressures of today’s society, taking care of teens and young adults with mental health issues is more important than ever. Suicide among young people in America is climbing. The Jordan Porco Foundation, named after a young man who took his life in Connecticut, is leading the charge in getting young people to talk to each other about issues, and to help those kids to get help.
On this edition of “Nyberg,” Tony Award-winning actor James Naughton of Connecticut, and Gillian Anderson have teamed up to talk about mental health, and to remove stigmas.
Anderson lost her daughter Abby, who had been diagnosed with clinical depression at the age of 15, to suicide.
“She was our world, as any parent would think about their child, and we thought we had a handle on everything. We really did, you know, hindsight is horrible, Abby did not show us a lot of symptoms, and when she did, they were very, very minor,” she said. “You couldn’t distinguish between them and regular teenage behavior. We had therapy, We had medication, but she knew how to hide it really well. The last therapist we had, probably about five months or so before she died, said you’re doing so great, you don’t even need to see me anymore, and I believed that. We all thought she was doing so much better.”
“As a grandparent, I have a couple of young grandkids, and you worry about stuff like that. I don’t recall that when we were kids, certainly not when I was a kid, there weren’t a lot of mass shootings of schools, and there wasn’t the kind of attention being paid because we have a lot of children taking their own lives,” said Naughton. “That’s a fairly recent development.”
If you want to help the Jordan Porco Foundation do more of its important work in preventing suicide and promoting mental health, you can go to their upcoming gala, which will be held at Foxwoods Casino on April 1st.
James Naughton will be there, and so will Ann Nyberg, who will emcee the event.
You can also visit rememberingjordan.org for more information.