Hundreds of doctors, researchers, and volunteers sit in the audience. Catherine Barber, a renowned researcher at the Harvard Injury Control Center, is on stage giving a lecture. Although the subject matter is serious, her speech is hopeful. Barber is here to discuss suicide prevention. Over the past several years, she has developed and refined the Means Matter campaign, a program designed to increase the number of suicide prevention groups for at-risk youths by reducing their access to lethal weapons. Barber is in the early stages of the research that she hopes will support the correlation between suicide and lethal weapons.
Off stage, Barber is much more lighthearted. She has a youthful presence. Her style is reminiscent of the seventies, but with a modern twist. She is dressed casually in a chunky knit sweater and black pencil skirt, and her long, gray-brown hair sits at her shoulders. But the seriousness of her work doesn’t seem to have aged her. She is in her forties, but she is surrounded by youth on a daily basis, from her two teens at home to the students at the Harvard School of Public Health. She loves to keep up with teen culture and the latest exercise fads. It is the vitality of youth that drives her passion for her research in preventing young adults access to lethal weapons. Barber is lucky. Her home is a happy one. She doesn’t have to worry about her family in terms of poor mental health. But there are thousands of young adults who don’t have stable homes, who don’t have Barber’s passion for life, and who could gain access to lethal weapons and take their life away. This is what Barber aims to prevent.
Barber has always been drawn to public policy. She grew up watching her mother perform research on moral decision-making in young people and became interested in issues of humanity and equality. But as a young adult she was torn between her love for the arts and her desire to influence public ways of thinking. In both high school and college, she was heavily involved in arts administration. In high school she ran a folk music coffee house and recruited performers from around the nation. After attending Hampshire College, where she graduated with degrees in Women’s History, Social Theory and Graphic Design, she ran an outdoor performing arts series in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Sara Wynkoop 