16779: Don’t Sugar-Coat Campaign Critique.

 

This Nigerian mental health awareness campaign—launched on World Suicide Prevention Day—takes a mindful and compassionate approach. But mistakenly using en dashes versus hyphens in the headlines is, well, depressing.

 

15810: Ulta Beauty Is Ultra Ugly—In Spades.

 

The New York Post reported on Ulta Beauty’s ugliness—that is, its outrageous example of cultural cluelessness—which ignited much-deserved online backlash. The cosmetics beauty retailer sent out the email referenced above, allegedly unintentionally making light of Kate Spade’s suicide by hanging in 2018. To make matters even more disgusting, May is Mental Health Awareness Month. Beautiful.

 

Fans rip Ulta Beauty for shocking email about Kate Spade’s suicide

 

By Samantha Ibrahim

 

Ulta Beauty is attempting to makeup with fans after ugly backlash over its latest “tone-deaf” email promotion.

 

The cosmetics mega company sent out an email for a Kate Spade perfume on Sunday that unintentionally alluded to the designer’s suicide. Ulta’s message to customers read “Come hang with Kate Spade” alongside a sale for its beauty products.

 

Spade died by suicide when she hanged herself in 2018. She was 55.

 

The beauty behemoth apologized in a statement to The Post on Monday.

 

“Ulta Beauty recently sent an email featuring Kate Spade New York fragrance with an insensitive subject line and for this, we sincerely apologize,” the rep said. “Mental health is a very serious, important issue in this country, and not something we would ever take lightly. We apologize to the Spade family, our Kate Spade New York brand partners and to our guests. Thank you for understanding as we strive to do better.”

 

Fans were appalled by the reference and expressed outrage on social media.

 

“How disgusting to use for clickbait,” wrote one, believing the message was written intentionally.

 

“I cannot believe I got this email today,” one person wrote on Twitter. “Is this some kind of sick joke? How insensitive and absolutely tone-deaf. Apparently nobody in marketing at Ulta remembers how Kate Spade died. Disgusting.”

 

Another chimed in, “Just got this email … this is wrong of Ulta Beauty … Kate Spade committed suicide by hanging herself.”

 

“Ulta Beauty corporate probably having a MELTDOWN realizing somebody sent out a promo email with the subject line Come hang with Kate Spade … somebody’s losing their job,” a user added.

 

“Ulta Beauty f—ked up with their Kate Spade email. Not only did I get a metric f—k ton of emails all night, but the headline was BULLS—T. Ulta gives no care to the mental health community, Kate Spade or her family. Gross,” a fan wrote.

 

As May marks Mental Health Awareness month, another noted, “Kate Spade was amazing and an icon. Your lack of attention to detail is sad at best, negligent and hurtful at worst. Do better. #MentalHealthAwareness.”

 

Criticizing the critics currently disseminating the promo, one insisted, “Sharing that awful ulta beauty x kate spade email is honestly worse than ulta sending it in my opinion because someone in the comments who would’ve never seen it otherwise literally said they were triggered by it. that person should’ve just emailed ulta.”

 

At the time of the fashion icon’s death, her family sent out a statement saying: “To most of the world, she was Kate Spade, the beautiful embodiment of her brand and a glamorous cultural icon.”

 

Kate Spade founded the brand with husband Andy Spade in the early 90s, putting up their own money to launch their line of preppy, colorful handbags, which they hustled together at trade shows for years until the likes of Barneys and Saks would carry them — and without the help of celebrity endorsements as so many brands rely on these days.

 

The duo sold their stake in Kate Spade to Neiman Marcus in 2006 — by then already considered iconic, and expanded beyond bags to include other accessories, clothing and home goods.

 

Andy released his own statement at the time of Kate’s death, explaining that “there were personal demons she was battling.”

 

“Kate suffered from depression and anxiety for many years. She was actively seeking help and working closely with her doctors to treat her disease, one that takes far too many lives,” he wrote in 2018.

14944: Havas In Guatemala Creates Killer Campaign. Not.

This self-promotional campaign from Havas in Guatemala is described as depicting “products committing suicide because of their awful ads”—with copy that reads, “Trust us with your brand, before it’s too late.” The insensitive, ignorant and culturally clueless cretins responsible for the work should do the world a favor and just kill themselves.

11242: The Art Of Suicide…?

Growing increasingly unimpressed with Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Here’s another questionable campaign that received a Lion, tackling the sensitive topic of suicide with an art promotion and headline reading, “Hang me again.” Would a greater representation of female jurors have resulted in more deserving winners?

From Ads of the World.

10174: Lane Pryce (2009-2012).

AMC series Mad Men is shedding characters on a weekly basis. In the last episode, Peggy Olson jumped ship. Now Lane Pryce has been killed off—needing two attempts to commit suicide—after being caught embezzling from the agency. In recent years, creator Matthew Weiner has managed to orchestrate the demise of at least one person per season, with two deaths taking place in the office (Don Draper’s previous secretary, Miss Blankenship, was the first inter-agency casualty). Hopefully, AMC series The Pitch will also die this year.

9756: Debunking The Black Suicide Myth.

From The Chicago Tribune…

Time to shatter the black suicide myth

By Clarence Page

The death of Don Cornelius, creator and host of “Soul Train,” brought two conflicting memories to mind: the weekly joy of that iconic program as a defining feature of black American pop culture, and the terrible pain inflicted on the surviving family and friends of those who commit suicide.

Like countless other boomers, I grew up with “Soul Train.” Today, the old clips look like an amusing period piece, especially to our kids or grandkids who wonder how any of us could have thought those “Saturday Night Fever” fashions were cool.

But in the 1970s and beyond, “Soul Train” defined cutting-edge cool. It became the longest-running syndicated show of its type on TV and, as Cornelius said every week, “The hippest trip in the galaxy.”

But the hip trip finally came to an end a few years ago on TV and for Cornelius, amid reports of failing health. Police say he died in his Los Angeles home of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

That tragedy has special meaning in the African-American community, which has long nourished a dangerous myth that black people don’t commit suicide.

It is a point of mythical ethnic pride that our ancestors found ways to persevere despite centuries of slavery, struggle and hardship. Black people created the blues, it is often said, because we didn’t have psychotherapists.

Besides, as an old joke goes, we black people don’t kill ourselves because you can’t kill yourself by jumping out of a basement window. We can only wish that were true. Although whites and Native Americans have the highest suicide rates, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the black suicide rate has been high enough in recent years to claim one African-American every 4.5 hours.

No group is immune. By gender, non-Hispanic white and Native American men have the highest suicide rates, of about 25 lives per 100,000. That’s more than four times the rate of women in each racial group. It also is more than twice the rate of black and Hispanic men, whose suicide rate of about 11 per 100,000 is five times the rate of black and Hispanic women. Asian-American men have a rate of about 9 per 100,000, slightly more than twice the rate of Asian-American women.

Yet the black suicide myth persists. “As a mental-health advocate, over the years I’ve heard variations of the ‘black people don’t commit suicide’ meme,” wrote Bassey Ikpi on the black-oriented The Root website after Cornelius’ death. “Yesterday the chorus was deafening. People went so far as to create elaborate conspiracy theories rather than accept what could be a simple truth — that Cornelius had taken his own life.”

I share her sense of frustration. I suddenly became an expert because of a personal tragedy, as many Chicagoans know. Back in May 1984, suicide ended the life and career of Leanita McClain, an award-winning Chicago Tribune columnist and ghetto-to-Gold-Coast success story.

She was also my former wife. She killed herself with an overdose of prescribed pills two years after our divorce. Her upward career trajectory, like our marriage, was stopped only by the furies of her relentless depression.

“Happiness is a private club that will not let me enter,” she wrote in her “generic suicide note.”

It is not hard, although it is not pain-free either, for me to imagine that Don Cornelius could have written the same message. Suicides inflict a terrible cruelty on the survivors. Everyone asks “why” and there are no easy answers. I was surprised by how many of my friends came forth to share stories of their own loved ones who had ended their lives or come close to it in their severe depression. I was shocked by how common such illnesses can be, regardless of race or community background.

I also learned about guilt. “People feel guilty if they failed to get help for their lost loved one,” a counselor told me, and they feel guilty if they did get help and the loved one killed him or herself anyway. It is best to seek help. Whether you believe it or not, you have too much to lose.

7257: Suicidal Stereotypes…?

From The Chicago Sun-Times…

‘Black people don’t commit suicide’
Social stigma helps to explain reaction to Michael Scott death

By Mark Brown Sun-Times Columnist

There’s an old saying in the African-American community, passed down from generation to generation, that goes a long way toward explaining some of what transpired here last week after the death of Chicago School Board President Michael Scott.

It goes like this: Black people don’t commit suicide.

“We’ve all heard that growing up,” acknowledged the Rev. Marshall Hatch, pastor of the New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church in West Garfield Park.

Not being an African American, count me among those who had never heard that stated before this week.

But it helped me understand the wide cultural disconnect that’s taken place in recent days as a large portion of Chicago’s black community has taken great umbrage with the initial finding that Scott committed suicide—a determination that only appears logical to most people on the other side of the racial divide.

The saying is not true, of course. Blacks do commit suicide, although they are much less likely to do so than whites.

The rate of suicide among blacks is about half the rate for the U.S. population as a whole. Up until the 1980s, the disparity was even wider with the black suicide rate at only one-fourth of the overall population’s.

The belief that African Americans don’t commit suicide may not be as much about statistics as about cultural identity.

It’s rooted in the concept that descendants of a people that survived the horrors of slavery—“the strongest of the strong”—would not choose to take their own lives, said Hatch. In that vein, “black people don’t commit suicide” is as much an admonition as a statement of fact.

One result is that the stigma that has long been attached to suicide across all cultures remains particularly strong in the African-American community, practically to the point of denial.

Don’t take my word for it. Just ask Donna Barnes, founder and president of the National Organization for People of Color Against Suicide.

It’s something she’s been dealing with ever since she started her organization 11 years ago in response to an anomaly that saw the suicide rate among young black males spike during a three-year period in the 1990s, suddenly equalling that of young white males. It’s since dropped back down, although Barnes is among many who believe black suicides are underreported.

African Americans have difficulty believing one of their own has committed suicide “because that’s not something we have been socialized to accept,” said Barnes, a sociologist at Howard University in Washington, D.C.

“It makes us look like we are weak,” she said.

On the other hand, “the dominant culture is very much aware of suicide,” Barnes said. “They talk about it. They seek help.”

Let’s stipulate right here that the “dominant culture” has a long way to go, too, in dealing with suicide, but it’s true whites have started talking more openly about suicide. That makes a big difference.

Barnes said that when a prominent member of the black community like a Michael Scott dies under these circumstances, people are shocked. That shock often translates into a sense of disbelief.

She said she has seen the same reaction many times in other situations across the country.

“They can’t process it, so they deny it,” Barnes said. “… They’ll say, ‘Oh, it was foul play. Oh, it was murder.’”

I would emphasize that Barnes was making no judgment on the Scott case, which she has followed only from a distance, although she said everything she has read is consistent with what she has seen in other suicides—including the absence of some obvious explanation for why Scott would have killed himself.

Last week, a group of ministers and community activists held a news conference to demand an outside investigation into Scott’s death. Some of them went so far as to call his death a murder, a most irresponsible accusation in my opinion given the facts as we know them.

I was surprised to hear that Hatch was among those in attendance, having always found him to be responsible and forthright in his community activism.

In our phone conversation, Hatch sought to distance himself from the murder allegation, saying he only wants an outside investigation “to clear the air” because of doubts and fears in the black community created in part by the early public clash between Chicago Police and the Cook County medical examiner.

I suggested another approach might have been to clear the air about black suicide. He didn’t dispute that.

“There’s a social stigma [about suicide] in the black community, if we’d be honest about it,” Hatch said.

That’s always a good place to start.