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When Dorothy Paugh was 9, her father bought a pistol and started talking openly about ending his life. Her mother was terrified, but didn't know what to do.

"She called our priest and called his best friend," Paugh recalled. "They came and talked to him and they didn't ask to take his gun away."

Her father was 51 when he shot himself to death.

The long, discouraging quest for a medication that works to treat Alzheimer's reached a potentially promising milestone on Wednesday. For the first time in a large clinical trial, a drug was able to both reduce the plaques in the brains of patients and slow the progression of dementia.

Greg Sturgill had been working as a nurse in Central Appalachia for 15 years when he was diagnosed with bipolar II disorder in 2006.

Sturgill was treated and hospitalized more than once while doctors attempted to balance his medication against pre-existing heart problems. He was startled to learn that his father had also suffered from mental illness and even received electroshock therapy, but had hidden his condition from his children.

A new study makes the case that a supportive manager might help employees with depression miss fewer days on the job.

The research, published Monday in BMJ Open, found that workplaces where managers support and help employees with depression have lower rates of missed days on the job due to depression. That support can come in the form of a formal policy, a referral system for care, or transitional support to help employees take time off work for mental health reasons and then return to their roles.

For almost two centuries now, scientists have noticed a place's suicide rate bears troubling links to the changing of the seasons and the friendliness of its climate.

In 1881, the Italian physician Enrico Morselli noted that suicide rates peak in the summer, deeming the effect "too great for it to be attributed to chance of the human will." Two decades later, the French sociologist Emile Durkheim noticed the same effect—though he also found the suicide rate was higher in Scandinavian countries.

SAN FRANCISCO — Here in the technology epicenter of the world, developers are increasingly writing code and launching products to try to disrupt yet another field: mental health.

Even as big tech players have conquered the markets in industries like transportation and lodging, they've largely steered clear of mental health treatment. Now, however, with an influx of funding, companies are revamping pills with digital sensors, designing virtual reality worlds to treat addiction and other conditions, and building chatbots for interactive therapy.

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline saw calls double from 2014 to 2017, an increase that coincides with rising suicide rates this decade in the United States.

The helpline answered over 2 million calls in 2017, up from approximately 1 million calls in 2014. In 2015 and 2016, the helpline answered over 1.5 million calls each year.

Adela Carranco was just 11 years old when her mother discovered she was planning to kill herself.

Her suicidal intentions were tapped out in cold detail on her cell phone, from options for ending her life—take pills, get run over, or slit her wrists—to notes saying goodbye to loved ones.