Today's Globe: guarding the mentally ill, not enough ICU sleep, evolution speeding up, silence on teen suicide

A Spotlight Team investigation into a recent surge in prison suicides and suicide attempts found cases in which correction officers, with scant training in how to handle the burgeoning number of mentally ill in prison, brutalized, mistreated, or neglected inmates.

Intensive care units are so noisy and disruptive that patients cannot get the restorative sleep that they need to heal, according to a report released yesterday (second item).

People are evolving more rapidly than in the distant past, with residents of various continents becoming increasingly different from one another, researchers say.

Suicide remains the sorrow that still struggles to speak its name, Eileen McNamara, a former columnist at the Globe, and now a journalism professor at Brandeis University writes on the op-ed page. Unless a suicidal youth stages a spectacular rampage that kills others as well as himself - think Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech last April or Robert Hawkins last Wednesday at an Omaha shopping mall - we rely on euphemism to smooth the sharp edges of a "sudden" and "unexpected" death, she writes. Faced with the choice between candor and compassion, many newspapers, including this one, shy away from identifying victims of suicide. It is hard to know who is protected by such policies.