How Brain Scans Can Detect Suicide Risks
Just a week before his own suicide, Jeremy Richman flew down to Florida to deliver a talk he called "The Neuroscience of Being Human(e)." In it, the 49-year-old neuropharmacologist examined how brain research might help identify people in crisis, so we could better intervene and assist those at risk of violence to themselves or others.
The topic could not have been timelier: Two days before Richman's keynote presentation on March 19, a student who had survived the massacre on February 14, 2018, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, took her own life, and another would do the same the following weekend. Meanwhile, in the United States, the number of people who die each year by suicide has jumped from 29,000 in 1999 to 47,000 in 2017.
It was also a subject Richman cared deeply about. On December 14, 2012, he and his wife, Jennifer Hensel, lost their little girl Avielle, 6, when a troubled teenager stormed Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and killed her and 25 others before shooting himself. Within 48 blurry hours, Richman would later recall, he and his wife had resolved to
