Part of preventing teen suicide also includes recognizing the issues that can trigger feelings of teen depression leading to suicidal thoughts and feelings. Teen suicide prevention requires diligence on the part of guardians, as well as a willingness to seek professional help when it is needed.
Recognizing teen suicidal behavior
One of the first steps to teen suicide prevention is to recognize suicidal behaviors in teenagers. It is important to be involved in a teenager’s life, so that you can recognize when behavior seems a little abnormal and prone to teen depression and/or teen suicide. Realizing that teenagers have a lot of stress on them today can help you understand that it may seem difficult for teens to cope with all of the life and hormonal changes they are going to. Be on the lookout for behavior that indicates a pattern of suicidal thoughts and feelings, including the following:
Expresses thoughts of death, dying and a desire to leave this life
Changes in normal habits, such as eating and sleeping, and spending time with friends and family
Dramatic weight fluctuations, in any direction
Evidence of substance abuse (alcohol and drugs, both legal and illegal)
Dramatic mood swings (becomes very happy after feeling very depressed)
Lost interest in schoolwork and extracurricular activities (including declining grades)
While all of these things are not necessarily indications of suicidal thoughts and feelings when taken separately, or happening rarely, a pattern can exhibit a serious problem, as can a combination of factors. Make sure that you take note of how often the above symptoms appear.
Teen suicide prevention
One of the most important aspects of teen suicide prevention is support. The teenager needs to know that you support and love him or her, and that you are willing to help him or her find hope in life again. One of the most effective ways to prevent teen suicide is to recognize the signs of suicidal thoughts and feelings, and seek professional help. Some of the most effective teen suicide prevention programs consist of identifying and treating the following problems:
Mental and learning disorders
Substance abuse problems
Problems dealing with stress
Behavior problems (such as controlling aggressive and impulsive behavior)
All of the above issues can be difficult for a teenager to cope with, leading to helplessness and discouragement, which in turn can turn to self-destructive thoughts in order to make an escape from the seemingly insurmountable pressures of life. Getting help for underlying problems, which almost always include teen depression can lead to more effective teen suicide prevention. Your support as a teenager you know enters therapy can help him or her more effectively recover and know that there are people who want to help him or her deal with the issues of life.
Teenage Suicide Prevention Main Source Material: “Teen Suicide.” Ohio State University Medical Center. Ohio State University. [Online.]
This is taken from: http://www.teensuicide.us/articles3.html
Some Things You Should Know
About Preventing Teen Suicide
In a recent study on the long-term impact of child abuse, adult women who said they were physically or emotionally abused as children were more likely to have mental problems, suffer from depression and to have attempted suicide.(1)
Suicide is the eighth leading cause of death for all persons regardless of age, sex or race; the third leading cause of death for young people aged 15 to 24; and the fourth leading cause of death for persons between the ages of 10 and 14.(2)
It is important to take the subject of suicide seriously. It doesn't seem right that a teen-ager - who has lived for such a short time - would choose to die. But adolescents who can't get over their depression sometimes do kill themselves.
Boys commit suicide more often than girls, but no one is immune. In one recent survey of high school students, 60 percent said they had thought about killing themselves. About 9 percent said they had tried at least once.
Why has the youth suicide rate gone so high in recent years?
It's easier to get the tools for suicide (Boys often use firearms to kill themselves; girls usually use pills);
the pressures of modern life are greater;
competition for good grades and college admission is stiff; and
there's more violence in the newspapers and on television.
Lack of parental interest may be another problem. Many children grow up in divorced households; for others, both of their parents work and their families spend limited time together. According to one study 90 percent of suicidal teen-agers believed their families did not understand them. (However, this is such a common teen-age complaint that other factors are playing a role, too.) Young people also reported that when they tried to tell their parents about their feelings of unhappiness or failure, their mother and father denied or ignored their point of view.
If your teen-ager has been depressed, you should look closely for signs that he or she might be thinking of suicide:
Has his personality changed dramatically?
Is he having trouble with a girlfriend (or, for girls, with a boyfriend)? Or is he having trouble getting along with other friends or with parents? Has he withdrawn from people he used to feel close to?
Is the quality of his schoolwork going down? Has he failed to live up to his own or someone else's standards (when it comes to school grades, for example)?
Does he always seem bored, and is he having trouble concentrating?
Is he acting like a rebel in an unexplained and severe way?
Is she pregnant and finding it hard to cope with this major life change?
Has he run away from home?
Is your teen-aager abusing drugs and/or alcohol?
Is she complaining of headaches, stomachaches, etc., that may or may not be real?
Have his eating or sleeping habits changed?
Has his or her appearance changed for the worse?
Is he giving away some of his most prized possessions?
Is he writing notes or poems about death?
Does he talk about suicide, even jokingly? Has he said things such as, "That's the last straw," "I can't take it anymore," or "Nobody cares about me?" (Threatening to kill oneself precedes four out of five suicidal deaths.)
Has he tried to commit suicide before?
If you suspect that your teen-ager might be thinking about suicide, do not remain silent. Suicide is preventable, but you must act quickly.
Ask your teen-ager about it. Don't be afraid to say the word "suicide." Getting the word out in the open may help your teen-ager think someone has heard his cries for help.
Reassure him that you love him. Remind him that no matter how awful his problems seem, they can be worked out, and you are willing to help.
Ask her to talk about her feelings. Listen carefully. Do not dismiss her problems or get angry at her.
Remove all lethal weapons from your home, including guns, pills, kitchen utensils and ropes.
Seek professional help. Ask your teen-ager's pediatrician to guide you. A variety of outpatient and hospital-based treatment programs are available.
This was taken from: http://www.aap.org/advocacy/childhealthmonth/prevteensuicide.htm
Helicopter Parenting Turns Deadly
By JUDITH WARNER
Megan Meier, a 13-year-old from Dardenne Prairie, Missouri, killed herself last year after an online relationship she believed she was having with a cute 16-year-old boy named Josh went very sour. What she didn’t know – what her parents would learn six weeks after her death – was that “Josh” was the fictitious creation of Lori Drew, a then-47-year-old neighbor and the mother of one of Megan’s friends.
Or former friends. Megan had, essentially, dropped the other girl when she’d changed schools and tried to put an unhappy chapter of her junior high school life – fraught with weight problems and depression – behind her.
Drew’s daughter, one assumes, would have eventually gotten over it. But Drew didn’t. Instead, she got revenge.
She created a fake MySpace profile (she later told police she’d done so to “find out what Megan was saying online” about her daughter, according to a sheriff’s report). Working with her daughter, she led Megan to become infatuated with “Josh.” And then she delivered the blow. “I don’t like the way you treat your friends,” Drew wrote. According to Megan’s father, “Josh”’s last e-mail to his daughter read, “You are a bad person and everybody hates you … The world would be a better place without you.”
The Meier case got massive play in the national media this past week, coming as it did on the heels of a major new survey showing that up to one in three children in the United States have been harassed or bullied online.
But for me the tragedy highlighted another troubling issue that threatens our homes just as steadily as poisonous online communications. That is the disturbing degree to which today’s parents – and mothers in particular – frequently lose themselves when they get caught up in trying to smooth out, or steamroll over, the social challenges faced by their children.
You only hear about the most freakish cases, like that of Lori Drew or of Wanda Webb Holloway, the Texas mother who in 1991 tried to pay someone to murder the mother of her daughter’s chief cheerleading rival. (“The motive here was love, a mother’s love for a daughter,” said a police investigator at the time.) Yet everyday examples abound of parents whose boundary issues are not so extreme, but still qualify as borderline wacko.
“People now feel like having a good relationship with your child means you’re involved in every aspect of your child’s life,” says Rosalind Wiseman, author of “Queen Bees & Wannabes” and “Queen Bee Moms & Kingpin Dads,” who travels the country speaking with and counseling parents, teachers and teens. “Nothing is off-limits” now between parents and their kids, she says. “There’s no privacy and there’s no critical thinking.”
Wiseman has heard stories of parents who hope to pave their child’s way to popularity by luring the in-crowd to parties with promised “loot-bag” giveaways like iPods and North Face fleeces. She recently heard of a father who, happening on an instant-messaging war between his child and a bunch of children on a sleepover, went over to the other house, called the other father outside, and began a fistfight that ended only after someone called the police. And of a mother who, unwilling to join her fifth-grade daughter in accepting the apology of another fifth-grader who’d bullied her in the playground, hounded the school incessantly, pushing for the other child to be expelled.
Parents, she says, routinely blow a gasket when they get it in their heads that they need to seek revenge on their child’s behalf. “It’s, ‘I’ve been wronged. My kid has been wronged, so I’ve been wronged; therefore I have to do whatever’s necessary, including being disgustingly immoral.’ ”
“Where are the brakes,” Wiseman asked, “on parental behavior?”
Otherwise put: where does adult behavior end and childish behavior begin?
“Morally speaking, they shouldn’t have done that,” a 22-year-old writing on Yahoo! Answers this week observed about the Drew case. “But I don’t think they should be held responsible b/c kids are mean to each other every day. It would not be any different than an actual 13 yr old boy being mean to another girl.”
That, of course, is the whole point.
Parents of teenagers are not supposed to act like teenagers. They’re not supposed to dress like teenagers or talk like teenagers or spend their days text-messaging teenagers – as one mom Wiseman encountered did, exchanging expressions of shock and dismay, after her 14-year-old daughter broke up with a popular and athletic boy. (“I was totally basking in the social status I was getting from the boy,” the very honest mother told Wiseman.)
Or, at least, parents weren’t supposed to act like this in the past.
“There used to be this kind of parent-child gradient, where the parent was expected to – and did – function at a different level than the child,” says clinical psychologist Madeline Levine, author of the 2006 book “The Price of Privilege,” who lectures frequently on child and adolescent issues. Now, she says, “that whole notion of parents being in an entirely different space than their children is disappearing.”
In part, Levine blames parenting experts for this turn of events.
She blames the self-esteem movement, decades of parenting advice that prized “communication” over limit-setting and safety. She blames the narcissistic needs of parents who want their children to like them at all costs. And in part, when thinking over the fused mother-daughter dyads she so often encounters in therapy, she indicts this generation of mothers’ loneliness, dissatisfaction in work and marriage, stress, sense of failure, and emotional isolation. In the end, she asks, when you’re feeling alone and blue, “Who are you sure is going to hang around with you? It’s your children.”
It’s very easy to put up walls to separate the likes of Lori Drew and Wanda Webb Holloway from the rest of us. Most of us, after all, are not sick or profoundly vindictive, entirely lacking in self-awareness or devoid of all empathy.
Still, we have all caught ourselves spending a little too much time worrying about (or gloating over) our children’s popularity. We spend a lot of time feeling our children’s pain and put a lot of thought into shaping their world to offer them the greatest possible degree of happiness. But our kids really need something much bigger from us than that. They desperately need us to grow up.
This was taken from the New York Times Online.
