"The True Gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety, and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies; who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity; who is himself humbled if necessity compels him to humble another; who does not flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deed follows his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others, rather than his own; and who appears well in any company, a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe."
- John Walter Wayland
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"It took a lot of courage to do that."
Anchor John Drury, 1927-2010
John Drury was definitely a "True Gentleman." He was the kind of man described in our creed (above) that I had to memorize and recite in order to become an Active and be initiated into Sigma Alpha Epsilon.
Remarkably, and the first word that comes to my mind in all honesty is "miraculously" he was also my colleague at WLS-TV, ABC7Chicago. It's still hard to believe at times, especially as I write this.
I started studying everything about him but watching him as I was growing up in River Forest, Illinois. I had tunnel vision, an epiphany and I would let nothing get in my way of realizing my goal and most important dream of becoming an Anchor, or "newscaster" as we always said until we learned how boogie that word was.
Fast forward from 7th grade when we moved from Shaker Heights, Ohio to Chicago's Western Suburbs about a dozen years and suddenly, there I was up on the news set sitting right next to John Drury.
I was trembling inside and afraid to say anything.
That Diann Burns was to his stage left as well made it that much more surreal and delightful.
But the occasion was as serious as it gets in life.
I was there to pay tribute to my mother the best way I could. From the moment I learned she had completed suicide, I had a sense of duty, responsibility and knew that someday I would have to tell her story.
Our story.
My family's worst nightmare.
What all survivors of suicide are forced to endure, "a club with the highest of dues," as I called it in the second half of "A Son of Suicide."
As nervous as I was in the minutes leading up to the live broadcast that night, somehow, when that little red light came on, I was in my zone.
John Drury and Diann Burns were so helpful and supportive. I'm so grateful to them and to everyone who was working on those two nights in February of 2000 in the newsroom and everyone in the station for that matter.
John Drury's had the last word. After my taped piece aired and I read my on camera tag, there was the question and answer chit chat with the anchors. We had gone over what should be said and who would say it in a most unusual meeting before airtime with then WLS-TV News Director Eric Lerner.
I have to say Lerner did everything and then some to make sure this series went off perfectly and he deserves great credit.
We never rehearsed or discussed what came our of John Drury's mouth that I will always remember and what an impression it made on everyone who heard him:
Fast forward from 7th grade when we moved from Shaker Heights, Ohio to Chicago's Western Suburbs about a dozen years and suddenly, there I was up on the news set sitting right next to John Drury.
I was trembling inside and afraid to say anything.
That Diann Burns was to his stage left as well made it that much more surreal and delightful.
But the occasion was as serious as it gets in life.
I was there to pay tribute to my mother the best way I could. From the moment I learned she had completed suicide, I had a sense of duty, responsibility and knew that someday I would have to tell her story.
Our story.
My family's worst nightmare.
What all survivors of suicide are forced to endure, "a club with the highest of dues," as I called it in the second half of "A Son of Suicide."
As nervous as I was in the minutes leading up to the live broadcast that night, somehow, when that little red light came on, I was in my zone.
John Drury and Diann Burns were so helpful and supportive. I'm so grateful to them and to everyone who was working on those two nights in February of 2000 in the newsroom and everyone in the station for that matter.
John Drury's had the last word. After my taped piece aired and I read my on camera tag, there was the question and answer chit chat with the anchors. We had gone over what should be said and who would say it in a most unusual meeting before airtime with then WLS-TV News Director Eric Lerner.
I have to say Lerner did everything and then some to make sure this series went off perfectly and he deserves great credit.
We never rehearsed or discussed what came our of John Drury's mouth that I will always remember and what an impression it made on everyone who heard him:
"It took a lot of courage to do that."
The most important compliment I've ever received and I only hope I'll never be in a position that somehow someone could say something more meaningful or important to me personally.
But life is like that. You never know.
But life is like that. You never know.
The two-part series was my idea. I wanted to do something that would hopefully matter and just might make a difference to people touched by suicide and possibly prevent some suicides as well.
Lerner said it best: "If we're lucky, we might help someone."
He turned out to be right and then some.
We helped a lot of people.
We saved lives. It's hard to know exactly how many people we encouraged to get help and not carry out their plans to attempt suicide.
I was taught in Journalism School that every viewer who contacts a TV station about a particular story represents at least 10,000 and in a big market like Chicago (#3,) perhaps as many as 100,000 other people who reacted similarly.
Seven people called me and said the story saved their lives.
Conservatively, I believe it's fair to say we helped save thousands of lives.
They all sounded something like this:
"Hello. Kevin? Is this really Kevin Roy?"
"Yes it is."
"Good! I'm so glad I got a hold of you. I had to call to thank you personally. Your report about your mother saved my life. I wouldn't be alive today if I hadn't seen it. What you did, Kevin, saved my life. I can't thank you enough."
People got help. They did not go through with their plans to attempt suicide.
The series went on to win an Emmy Award and many other journalistic honors.
Along the way, I was reminded of a very important lesson and the reason I went into broadcast journalism. It's the best and most important reward I've ever experienced.
Improving and saving lives with journalism that matters.
I always say yes when I'm asked to speak or serve as a Master of Ceremonies. I have volunteered for many mental health groups. I see the elephant in the room that most people would rather ignore and don't know how to begin such a discussion if they wanted to. That elephant is the stigma against people with mental illnesses and when it shuts people up, ignorance grows. It becomes more lethal. The suicide rate keeps climbing annually. That fact says we are failing. Horribly. Tragically.
The loss of my mother, the best person I've known, is beyond tragic and all survivors of suicide can attest to how sad it is that we haven't made this our top priority already.
How many more people do we have to lose for us to give this the attention it deserves?
He turned out to be right and then some.
We helped a lot of people.
We saved lives. It's hard to know exactly how many people we encouraged to get help and not carry out their plans to attempt suicide.
I was taught in Journalism School that every viewer who contacts a TV station about a particular story represents at least 10,000 and in a big market like Chicago (#3,) perhaps as many as 100,000 other people who reacted similarly.
Seven people called me and said the story saved their lives.
Conservatively, I believe it's fair to say we helped save thousands of lives.
They all sounded something like this:
"Hello. Kevin? Is this really Kevin Roy?"
"Yes it is."
"Good! I'm so glad I got a hold of you. I had to call to thank you personally. Your report about your mother saved my life. I wouldn't be alive today if I hadn't seen it. What you did, Kevin, saved my life. I can't thank you enough."
People got help. They did not go through with their plans to attempt suicide.
The series went on to win an Emmy Award and many other journalistic honors.
Along the way, I was reminded of a very important lesson and the reason I went into broadcast journalism. It's the best and most important reward I've ever experienced.
Improving and saving lives with journalism that matters.
I always say yes when I'm asked to speak or serve as a Master of Ceremonies. I have volunteered for many mental health groups. I see the elephant in the room that most people would rather ignore and don't know how to begin such a discussion if they wanted to. That elephant is the stigma against people with mental illnesses and when it shuts people up, ignorance grows. It becomes more lethal. The suicide rate keeps climbing annually. That fact says we are failing. Horribly. Tragically.
The loss of my mother, the best person I've known, is beyond tragic and all survivors of suicide can attest to how sad it is that we haven't made this our top priority already.
How many more people do we have to lose for us to give this the attention it deserves?
John Drury was someone I looked up to as I was growing up in River Forest, a suburb west of Chicago. He died in 2007 from ALS, or Lou Gherig's disease. ALS left him unable to do anything for himself, including speaking and eating. Ironic, to say the least, that the great communicator was silenced this way.
Drury invited his colleague and friend, Frank Mathie, into his home to report on the final moments of his struggle with ALS. They hoped it might increase awareness, funding, and decrease the stigma against people with the terminal brain disorder.
It did.
It did.
"A Son of Suicide," I'm proud to say, did, too.
I'm Kevin Roy on the Mental Health Beat.
Have a story to share? A story suggestion? Please contact me. I care.
I hope you'll watch this and if you agree, Take the Pledge to end the stigma by Bring Change 2 Mind.
Please tell Glenn Close and the BC2M Team I sent you there. And then tell everyone you can to take the pledge and talk openly and honestly about our brains.
Thank you,
Kevin Roy
krroy7@yahoo.com
708.821.4670
I'm Kevin Roy on the Mental Health Beat.
Have a story to share? A story suggestion? Please contact me. I care.
I hope you'll watch this and if you agree, Take the Pledge to end the stigma by Bring Change 2 Mind.
Please tell Glenn Close and the BC2M Team I sent you there. And then tell everyone you can to take the pledge and talk openly and honestly about our brains.
Thank you,
Kevin Roy
krroy7@yahoo.com
708.821.4670
Overcoming the stigma against people with mental illnesses is possible. It will also reduce the rate of suicide. It requires more mental health reporting and love.
I'm not afraid of so-called taboo topics.
They're usually the most interesting and most misunderstood subjects and that makes them newsworthy.
Despite conventional wisdom that reporting on suicide could scare off viewers, it doesn't. In fact, we always had higher ratings than average for every Special Segment about preventing suicide and reducing the stigma.
As an Anchor for 5 TV stations, my newscasts were always #1 in the ratings.
I can be serious and I love to laugh.
I'm human.
I dream again of doing more of this.
It's my duty, responsibility and my one and only goal now.
Transcript of "A Son of Suicide," WLS-TV, ABC7 Chicago
Pictures of the way my family used to be. These are my most treasured possessions.
My mother's smile lights up every portrait. My father says she was the glue that held us together.
"She was the center of our lives, that's the type of person she was," said Robert Roy, my father.
But behind that bright smile, Diane Marcus Roy hid a lifelong battle with bipolar disorder, manic-depression, which proved to be fatal.
Growing up in River Forest, there were few clues when my family lived here. At her 50th birthday party, no one could have imagined my mother would be dead a year-and-a-half later.
Her life started to unravel in 1993. After 29 years of marriage, she announced she wanted a divorce. She left my father, sold the house, quit her law practice and moved from Chicago to Sedona, Arizona all within a year. She also had a newfound interest in anything that was of a spiritual nature.
"She was seeing spiritualists, card readers, psychics" my father said.
So many changes in so little time -- classic signs, I would later learn, of a manic phase. And so it was for the next six months; her family wanting to believe these changes were all for the better. But then, suddenly, she crashed.
On a summer night in 1995 I came home to a message on my answering machine -- my father telling me my mother was threatening suicide.
We flew her back to Chicago, she met with a suicide counselor and came up with a plan to leave Arizona and move back home. My mother even promised my sister and me that suicide was not an option.
She flew back to Sedona supposedly to sell her condo. Four days later we got a call from the Sedona police. She was dead.
"She put herself in a bathtub, she lit candles, she had gone to the store and bought vodka, she never drank, and she ingested this vodka as fast as she could," said Robert Roy. "I think I should have gotten on that airplane with her, I should have been smart enough to say no to going on that airplane. But I was none of that."
My mother did leave a note written nearly a month before she died. She signed it, "Forgive me if you can. Love, Diane."
"I feel like she damaged me. She hurt me in such a horrible, horrible way," said Pamela Roy, my sister.
Forgiveness has been difficult, especially forgiving ourselves for missing or overlooking some of the warning signs.
Experts say a person might be suicidal if he or she:
- talks about committing suicide
- experiences drastic changes in behavior
- withdraws from friends
- loses interest in work, school, hobbies.
- or gives away prized possessions.
My mom gave away her dog weeks before she took her life.
Now, it all seems so obvious. She was mentally ill.
Poor decisions and radical life changes sank her into a terrible depression. But tragically, my mother never was diagnosed as manic-depressive.
She did take anti-depressants, on occasion. But she was never hospitalized nor got the kind of help she really needed because she was an expert at concealing her true feelings.
"The psychologist who saw her at the suicide prevention center said to me, and I saw her later, that she was the best they had ever seen at hiding what she felt," my father, Robert Roy, said.
"The thinking is so fevered that one does false credit to think that your mom was logical and thoughtful at the time that she killed herself. It was her illness speaking and not her," said Dr. David Clark, a University of Illinois at Chicago Suicidologist.
Her illness may have had the final word but as my photo albums show, she spoke to us with love and caring during her 51 years. It is those words I now hear. It is those words that I still miss.
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