and so if your a parent and you notice that
your child or perhaps one of their
friends is exhibiting warning signs for
suicide the question is really what can
you do about it. I think the most
challenging part is to take the first step
and that's ask if they're ok. You know
is everything alright? Are they thinking
about suicide. We sometimes don't ask
that question because we're afraid of
the answer, sometimes we don't ask that
question because we don't have a clue
what to do if they say yes but we need to ask are they ok. But sometimes it has to be
tied in with why are we asking this
question in the first place
You know kids try to hide these things and make
sure that we don't pick these things up
and and understand what's going on with
them and the challenge that we
have as adults is to help them
understand that you know as well as
they're doing at kinda masking their
emotions maybe their behaviour has changed or
something's different about them so for
example a teacher in school notices
a student's got their head on the desk. What do you do about that? You can knock
on the desk and say hey wake up or you can say hey is everything ok you don't normally sleep
in class and seems like you've been
really tired lately but also I notice
you're not talking to your friends in the
hallway, you're hanging out by yourself this
is different from how you usually are. You know, is everything alright and then depending on
what they have to say you know we have to kinda knock off our parenting instinct to
fix it and actually do a really good job
of listening and not being judgmental
about what they're saying
telling kids everything's gonna be ok
well we might have that understanding as
adults that maybe it is gonna be ok. The
problem for kids is right in that moment
it doesn't feel like it's gonna be okay. It doesn't feel like anything's gonna
get any better and when we say hey
everything's going to be ok what they
hear is you didn't hear a
word I had to say. So we have to do good reflective listening. You know so somebody comes and
says to you, hey I feel really awful on Saturday mornings our response should be it sounds like you feel
really awful on Saturday mornings. It sounds simple, you don't need an advanced
degree to do it but it tells the kids
"hey I heard what you had to say and did
I get it right." You know they often give
you big monologues so we have to sort of
summarize that: "Did I get it right?" and
when you do they're with you and they're
willing to say more about it. We need to let them know they're not alone
things will get better in the sense that
we're going to work on this together and
if I need to help find somebody for you
that you can talk to about this we'll
work on that together.
Kids don't know how to get that sort of
help. We need to let them know there's treatments
out there that are effective. So it's not
just "you've been struggling with this you're whole
time and you've been working really hard to get
better but nothing works and you know
what I'm not sure anybody out there can
really help us." The truth is there are
people that can help. There are
treatments that work. We need to get
these folks to those treatments and
lastly the job of a parent of course is if you
can't do the work yourself get them to
the help that they need.
