from: Edie Magnus, Executive Producer, Cry For Help

This all started pretty simply: we were touched by a story. In this case it was a story heard round the world: the slaughter at Virginia Tech. Almost immediately the reports began to circulate: the perpetrator had been diagnosed with mental illness, there’d been signs of his violent fantasies, but nobody had put the troubled pieces of his life together in time. Very soon after that we learned that for every young person like him who takes the lives of others, there are exponentially more who take their own lives. Again, there are often signs of mental illness. But the signs go unrecognized, and the pain goes untreated, and with their lives frayed in so many ways, many adolescents, as one doctor aptly put it, “get the short end of the stick” as they go through life. The troubling statistics mentioned throughout Cry for Help tell it all. There’s an enormous chasm between what we (adults) understand about their lives, and what they’re actually going through. Read More …

A Newshour special–coverage of President Obama’s Wednesday press conference–will air on Thirteen on 4/29 at 8pm instead of our regularly-scheduled programming. The conference will run approximately 60 minutes; the premiere of the documentary Cry for Help, about teens and depression, will follow at 9pm.

For Worldfocus’ signature series, “Liberia’s Long Road Back”, producers Lynn Sherr and Megan Thompson recently went to Liberia to track the current conditions of the country, 5 years after their brutal civil wars ended. With the influence of President Ellen Sirleaf, the reconstruction has prominent roles for women.

Stories in the series (watch now):
Women’s movement transforms post-war Liberia
Liberia, “America’s stepchild,” searches for own identity
Former child soldiers, sex slaves recover from Liberia’s war
Liberian women occupy front lines of war on sexual violence

All of the questions pertain to these reports from Sherr and Thompson. Read More …

The newest story in Wide Angle’s web-only video series, Focal Point, travels with North Korean student defector and her high school class to the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone between North and South Koreas). The subject is a 20-year-old young woman whose parents arranged her exodus from her home in North Korea around when she was 17. She now attends school in South Korea and is still adjusting to her new life on her own. Watch the video now–we did, and then had some follow-up questions, which Jong Suk Lee, one of the piece’s producers (along with Micah Fink) was kind to answer, below:

How many people leave/defect from North Korea every year? Read More …

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