Engaging students’ minds and emotions: using multiple strategies to teach about suicide.

Suicide is a difficult topic that must be addressed in courses on death, dying, and bereavement. This article addresses three strategies that can help students broach this difficult topic. These include using statistical data and sociological concepts to teach students about patterns of suicide and its causes, showing a documentary film to help students understand why individuals commit suicide and the consequences that it has, and using a writing assignment that enables students to apply and synthesize sociological ideas to a case study. These strategies engage students intellectually and emotionally, and allow them to understand suicide in new ways.