PREFACE

JENNIFER RIEDL CROSS

My history with suicide has been tangential to Tracy’s. I have been an onlooker as he became immersed in this difficult topic to which he was drawn in as a researcher and remained involved out of compassion. As a mother, I am concerned about the well-being of any child who considers ending his or her own life. In 1978, the philosopher Michel Foucault wrote of the “Right of death and power of life” (p. 134), in which he described suicide as a form of empowerment. It is an expression of power over another to take away a person’s ability to do what he or she wants to do to relieve his or her suffering. Tracy and I come at this from a different place. Although biology is involved in some suicidal behavior, we believe conditions can play a powerful role in fostering a mindset that leads to suicide. Rather than disempowering individuals who want to take their own lives, we want to empower them by identifying the conditions that have led them to this place and showing them the way out. It is the conditions that we want to understand, so that we can propose ways of improving them for anyone—young or old—who feels hopeless enough to think that suicide is the only escape from pain. Exceptional individuals face unique challenges and students with gifts and talents are, by definition, exceptional. Our purpose here is to use what we know about students with gifts and talents to turn around what might appear to them to be hopeless situations.