A Parent's Guide for Suicidal and Depressed Teens Read Online Free PDF Page A

she go to a counselor. She resisted, saying, "All my friends say therapists are full of shit." She continued to say that as she went to therapy. I said I knew it was difficult but the visits were nonnegotiable. You must get your child in to a therapist fast. Get the physical body there; don't worry about what you'll do next.

 

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State the Obvious
You must tell your child that you love and want her or him to work through the pain.
As a teacher, I had been around kids long enough to know that it would not be helpful to say, "How could you think such a thing?" I also knew that I didn't want to tell her to shut up. Nor did I want to say, "Go ahead and make your own decisions." That seemed really cold. But I didn't know how to talk about "it."
Suicide is an act of violence, an act of self-destruction. It may seem horrifying to you, and you may have trouble expressing your love in the face of suicide. What helped me was to take out her baby pictures and look at all her natural positive energy and imagine that energy still being with her. I imagined her as a child swimming, playing by herself, counting pinecones in the backyard. I imagined all the active, energetic things she used to do as a way to keep in touch with the spirit in her that wanted to live. I knew that child in the photos was still inside her. But the part of her that felt joy intensely and passionately dealt with sorrow the same way. She needed guidance. So I set out to ask for help from friends who had been depressed and suicidal.

 

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Talk about "It"
I sometimes wonder if the sexual revolution eliminated sex as a taboo, and therefore the younger generation had to find a new way to rebel, to be shocking to the older generation. Could suicide be the new taboo that must be toyed with? Or was it something I'd never really known much about?
I started asking people in my peer group whether they had ever wanted to commit suicide, and many of them said, "Well, yes, I thought about it." One day I spoke in a meeting of my Alcoholics Anonymous group, and I talked about how upset I was about the idea of suicide. In the past, whenever anyone in the group had mentioned suicide, I had tuned them outit was just not acceptable. But that day I heard many stories from people who'd once felt suicidal. I discovered it was a part of many people's lives. I concluded that I had been too repressed by religion to even consider suicide. Perhaps thinking about suicide was a fairly normal part of coming to terms with emotional pain. When a person is in pain, working through it includes the choice of feeling it or not, the decision of living through it or not. In most cases, people choose to live.
In the process of talking with people, a friend who had been depressed and suicidal gave me a book that has become my favorite: Suicide: The

 

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Forever Decision. I highly recommend it, especially if it is difficult for you to talk directly about suicide with your child.
The author of this book, Paul G. Quinnett, talks directly to a person contemplating suicide. The first sentence is "The first thing I want to tell you about suicide is that you don't have to be crazy to think about it or, for that matter, even to try it. Suicide is a solution. . . ." 1 His matter-of-fact tone taught me how to talk about the subject. It helped me be conversational. Now I can say, "Suicide is a choice, but have you thought about the fact that your life may get better if you hang in for a while?" I became able to bring up the subject and converse in a normal tone of voice. When talking to Rachel I would say things like,
Feelings change every day; you may feel great tomorrow. Life is about choices, and when you make the decision to die, you are saying that you don't have other choices. There are always choices. Have you really tried everything to solve your problems? What if you're depressed and there is help for depression? What if your thoughts change?
In the past five years, one of my most