Former Detroit Lions quarterback, Eric Hipple, lost his son to suicide in 2000. He now tours schools, talking about teenagers' susceptability to the suggestion of suicide. I found this admission rather startling:
Hipple and his wife, Jann, college sweethearts, divorced when Jeff was 5, and his sister was 7.
She and the children moved back to Utah, where the Hipples had met at Utah State University. She remarried and divorced two more times.
"It's traumatic for kids to go through a divorce," says Hipple, who admits to being depressed as a teen and who has a history of mental illness in his family. He grew up in Lubbock, Texas.
"He went through a lot of changes as a young child," Hipple says of his son. "The first thing that made an impression on me was how he had to figure out who Dad was. I think that's very stressful for a kid. He finally figured out I was the real dad, the biological father, and the others were his stepfathers."
