Concert promotes suicide prevention and awareness

Suicide is the third-leading cause of death for Americans ages 15 to 24, largely because most people don’t want to talk about it, said Kyle Ferguson, president and founding member of the Alive Campaign, a grassroots organization created to raise awareness about and prevent suicides.

As part of a documentary, Ferguson and other representatives will film a special concert dedicated to that mission at BuffaLouie’s tonight.  

The concert is in honor of the memory of BuffaLouie’s co-owner Ed Schwartzman’s son, Ben, who ended his life Oct. 15, 2007, at 19. Before his death, Ben created a CD of his own music. Schwartzman’s experience and his son’s music will be featured in the documentary, said Andi Nakasone, Internal Vice President, director and Alive
Campaign founding member.

“His story and his son’s music will be a foundation for our film,” Nakasone said, adding that the purpose of the film is to create an emotional connection between the viewer and the issue, to make it more real for the audience. “This is a problem that millions of people suffer through.”

Featured artists will include guitarist Dave Campbell, jazz group the Francisco Dean Quintet and acoustic rock band Moments of Clarity. Junior Ryan McFarland, lead singer of Moments of Clarity, said he and his bandmates have known Schwartzman since childhood and were good friends with his son.

“We both were grieving and it brought us closer together,” McFarland said of Ben’s death. “It’s so far beyond people’s comprehension ... they don’t think about it as a possibility.”

Ferguson and Nakasone said that when someone tries to talk about suicidal feelings with a friend, the most common reaction is that the friend will change the subject.
The campaign began as the Facebook group “Four guys, one destination, one mission: Suicide Prevention.” Ferguson, Nathan Lloyd, financial director of the Alive Campaign, Steve Zimmerman and Justin Brown, external vice president of the Alive Campaign, were all students at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and discovered a friend was contemplating suicide. To show him the impossible was possible, they issued a challenge: If 250,000 people joined their group, they would bike from Waco to Anchorage, Alaska. They wanted to prove that humans had no limits, to give him something to live for, according to the Facebook group.

“In less than two weeks, 250,000 people had joined the group,” Ferguson said. “People who didn’t even know each other were helping each other. People told us what they needed was just to get the word out there.”

Joined by fellow students Alyson Erikson, administrative director of the Alive Campaign, and Nakasone, the riders left Waco on May 15, 2008. A long 74 days and 4,500 miles later, they arrived in Anchorage on July 27, documenting with video and blogs along the way.

“We want to tell the stories of people who are lost to suicide, and, in conjunction with that, using our trip to show what you can do to prevent suicide,” Nakasone said of the documentary, which is expected to come out by early 2010.

More detailed information can be found on the campaign’s MySpace and Facebook pages or the official Web site, www.alivecampaign.org.

Schwartzman said he believes it is so prevalent that it’s almost impossible not to be affected by suicide.

“If you can save a life, you can save the world,” he said, quoting the Jewish holy book, the Talmud.