By Greg Halbleib
NORMAL – A former Major League Baseball pitcher who lost his son to suicide is raising awareness about teenage mental health.
John Trautwein spoke at Illinois State University Wednesday night. Trautwein’s son Will committed suicide in 2010 while a high school freshman, an event that caught the father completely off guard.
“What I found out very quickly, literally within days, is that our situation is extremely common,” Trautwein told WJBC’s Scott Laughlin and Patti Penn, “which absolutely floored me when I started hearing the statistics that one in six high school students suffers from some form of depression, and a teenager takes their life in America every two hours, every single day.”
Trautwein formed the Will to Live Foundation with his wife Susie to raise money and awareness about mental illness, which he said doesn’t get the same level of concern as other sicknesses.
“We decided, well, that’s wrong,” Trautwein said. “If my son would have died of cancer or some other more, how would I say, accepted disease, people would be talking about it. But mental illness has a stigma to it, and no one wants to talk about it, no one did talk about it, and even today very few people are talking about it.”
Trautwein and his wife Susie formed the Will to Live Foundation, which has raised more than $1 million to prevent teen suicide through awareness and education.
Greg Halbleib can be reached at [email protected].
