Will's Choice: A Suicidal Teen, a Desperate Mother, and a Chronicle of Recovery

In the early hours of March 11, 2001, seventeen-year-old Will ingested a near-fatal dose of his antidepressant medication, an event that forever changed his life and the lives of his family. In Will's Choice, his mother, Gail Griffith, takes us down the very personal road each of the family members traveled to renew Will's interest in life and to regain their equilibrium in the aftermath of his self-destructive act. Griffith intersperses her own finely wrought prose with dozens of letters and journal entries from family and friends, including many from Will himself, allowing us to bear witness to Will's attempts to explain what even he cannot fully understand: why he did it.

A memoir with a social conscience, this book not only examines one family's struggle to overcome depression and an attempted suicide, it lays bare the social, political, and economic challenges that American families face in combating this most mysterious and stigmatized of illnesses. In Gail Griffith, depressed teens have found themselves a formidable new advocate. And in the evocative and fiercely compelling narrative of Will's Choice, we all discover the promise of a second chance.