On June 19, 2014, Ryan Joseph Candice, a University of Missouri-Columbia student and Ballwin native, took his own life. Bright and outgoing, he was three weeks shy of his 21st birthday. No one saw it coming.
On the surface, Ryan seemed to have it all. Fellow Mizzou classmate and childhood best friend Alex Lindley describes him as “incredibly popular, driven, determined, and smart.”
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Alex knew what to look for. After the loss of another close friend, 19-year-old Carolyn Dolan, to suicide during their freshman year, he became hyper-vigilant in searching for warning signs in his friends. “I tried to make sure everybody was OK… and still didn’t catch anything in Ryan,” Alex says.
What frustrated him was the belief that things might’ve been different had there not been such a stigma surrounding mental illness on college campuses.
“I started to feel angry at society because of the stigma around mental illness—especially for guys in college. Ryan was afraid to voice his anxiety because he would’ve felt crazy—and so many people suffer, so many lives could be saved if there wasn’t such a stigma.”
Alex envisioned a documentary film, something to keep Ryan’s memory alive and simultaneously help eradicate suicide and stigma around mental illness for young adults. When he brought the idea to his peers, everyone was eager to get on board. From creative collaboration, the Wake Up Documentary project was born.
The topic hit home for most group members who’d known Carolyn and Ryan, but for senior Danny Kerth, the project resonated on an even deeper personal level. Danny lost his own father, Al Kerth, the legendary PR executive whom U.S. Sen. John Danforth dubbed “St. Louis’ most important civic resource,” to suicide in 2002. At the time, Danny was just 9 years old.
“When Al committed suicide, I wanted to emphasize how important it is to talk about it,” Kerth’s wife, Susan, explains over coffee. Danny, the youngest of three boys, nods in agreement. “People were shocked; they couldn’t imagine this happened. At the funeral, I wanted to be very open about how Al suffered from bipolar disorder and explain that it is a physical illness. For him, it was a fatal illness, just like cancer is fatal for many people.”
Danny and his brothers grew up with a unique understanding of the exact message that the Wake Up Documentary hopes to promote: Mental illness isn’t a choice—there is nothing to be ashamed of—and it’s crucial to talk about it.
With those goals in mind, the Mizzou group sprang into action. No one knew much about the film industry, but $10,000 sounded like a reasonable goal. The campaign launched with an online fundraising page. Just 20 hours later, the Wake Up campaign met its target and kept climbing. “I knew we were seriously onto something,” Alex says. After a few weeks, donations plateaued around $22,000, but the students aimed higher.
Researching every detail of the production process, the group decided to make the Wake Up film Hollywood-grade. First, they hired a professional crew. For Alex, the addition of director Nate Townsend sealed the deal. “Nate is from St. Louis, but lives in L.A. He has experienced personal loss as well, and he said to me, ‘We’re going to create a film that people actually want to watch. It’s hard to make people want to watch a documentary about this, but we’re going to do it. This isn’t going to be another movie collecting dust in a therapist’s office.’”
In March, the crew followed Alex and his friends to shoot footage and conduct interviews on campus and back in Ryan’s West County hometown. The month culminated in a trip to Ryan’s favorite childhood vacation spot, Hilton Head, South Carolina, where the crew captured Ryan’s friends and family scattering his ashes across the Atlantic.
Now, the crew is working to produce a 10- to 15-minute short, the “tangible preview” that will help gain national media attention and secure Wake Up as a feature in upcoming mental-health conventions this summer.
“We’re thinking really big here,” Alex says. “We’re trying to make this festival-quality, Netflix-quality. We want it to be picked up by universities around the nation.
“Mizzou is backing it on campus here, and people have been incredibly open and supportive,” he adds. “The director of the psychology department said mental-health conventions are really hurting for something like this.”
Alex and his group of friends behind the film at Mizzou received special training in suicide awareness and prevention, something usually reserved for faculty. With the experience, the group formed the Mizzou Suicide Prevention Coalition.
For Danny Kerth, the experience was an honor. “As a group, we want to become a more open resource for people who might need that kind of help,” he says, “but are uncomfortable reaching out to someone older than them.”
And people are starting to reach out.
“Kids are starting to talk about it at Mizzou,” Alex says. “It’s an emotional story, but it’s going to educate and get the conversation started. That’s the most important thing: As long as people are talking about it, we have the chance to make a difference.”
