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REMEMBERING LUIGI TRENTI PAROLI

A personal campaign sponsored by Emma Trenti Paroli

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Luigi Trenti Paroli

June 6, 1996  — January 19, 2017

 

 

To our friends who expressed a desire to make a donation in honor of Luigi’s memory, we are suggesting two non-profit organizations. The first, called Graham’s Foundation and dedicated to help families of premature babies, is meant to remember the circumstances of Luigi’s birth.  We chose the second, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, or AFSP, to acknowledge how Luigi’s life ended. 

Why did Luigi take his own life? Could we have prevented this tragedy? These stabbing questions will never leave us, deepening the enormity of our loss. As much as we loved and cared for him we weren’t able to fully detect, understand and stop him on a path we don’t know when he started walking down, that brought him to end his own life.

Unfortunately, many other families of college-age students are bound to experience the same kind of loss we are dealing with today.  A traveling exhibition of the advocacy group Active Minds has been placing on the lawns of college campuses 1,100 empty backpacks, representing the approximate number of undergraduates who commit suicide each year in the U.S.  Suicide is the third leading cause of death between the ages of 15 and 24 years, following accidental injury and homicide, and the second among college students because of the low rate of homicide in their group. According to a recent study, suicidal thinking is much more common than anyone would think: more than half of students (in a sample of 26,000 undergraduate and graduate students at 70 colleges and universities) admitted having some form of suicidal thought in their lives; 6% of undergraduates and 4% of graduate students reported that they “seriously considered attempting suicide” in the past 12 months. 

Though AFSP doesn’t exclusively address the crisis of young people’s suicides, but that of suicide in all age groups, they are doing an admirable job raising awareness in colleges and high-schools around the country; funding psychiatric research; training clinicians in suicide prevention; and helping people who are struggling with suicidal thinking and families who’ve lost a dear one to suicide. Your donation to AFSP will remember our beloved Luigi by, hopefully, helping to save other lives.  

Thank you, 

The Trenti Paroli family

 

 

If you would like to read more:

https://nabita.org/documents/NewDataonNatureofSuicidalCrisis.pdf

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/education/edlife/stress-social-media-and-suicide-on-campus.html?_r=0