Dr. Anthony Jurich, expert in adolescent suicide prevention, stated, “Death is a five-letter ‘four-letter’ word.” In our culture, it is easier to avoid the topic and shove or push it away if it does come up and deny it as a possibility. Parents today never imagined that their beloved son or daughter could consider or have to deal with such serious and consequential obtrusions. In Part I, I will help parents be able to recognize and understand the process of how adolescents or anyone can find themselves on this path, and Part II will be focused on helping parents devise a plan for creating the support that their child needs. You can find Part II here

Understanding the Path to Suicide

Suicide is the 3^rd leading cause of death for adolescents ages 15-24. Stressors can take a variety of forms from cataclysmic like death, divorce, or job loss as well as social stressors or ones that impact a person’s identity. It may be chronic impact of a person’s resources like physical illness or mental illness or even undesired loneliness. Whatever the cause, if we can understand the more global reasons of how someone arrived at dealing with suicidal thoughts or considering suicide as an out, then we can understand how to effectively support and treat that person. Menniger, Mayman, and Pruyser constructed a 5-stage model outlining the course that would bring a person to suicide, which is outlined below:

1. Impairment of a person’s coping abilities– In stressful times, a person could only cope so long before their strategies would become less effective and insufficient to deal with stress. Some adolescents have a flawed ability to cope even before the stressor happens.
2. Personality becomes increasingly disorganized– this is when disordered symptoms seem to appear.
3. Loss of control– the adolescent feels increasingly unable to cope and as if the problems are at accelerating speed.
4. Sever the adolescents’ from the overwhelming reality– stress and the inability to cope produce an overwhelming emotional distress from which they retreat from reality to a time when they felt more control. They may consider death and its ability to provide relief.
5. Severe depression, intense anxiety, and uncertainty- at this point death appears a reasonable solution to their overwhelming problems. 

As a parent in Sandy, Utah or anywhere, your first task is to be able to increase your awareness and recognize “red flags” manifesting in your child’s life. If you notice that your child is coping in ways that are out of character such as increased risk-taking behaviors in order to manage real or perceived stressors, developing symptomology such as over- or under eating and/or sleeping, feeling like a failure or having let someone down, dealing with multiple stressors at the same time, increased social pressures and inability to manage them effectively, isolation, and withdrawal. These may be signs that your child needs additional skills and tools to be resilient to cataclysmic and daily stressors.

In Part II, I will share how parents can devise an effective intervention, safety, and support plan. In the meantime, if your teenager or a teenager you know is dealing with these types of symptoms, they need to know that they are not alone in their struggle.