Link – Half Of Parents Whose Teens Consider Suicide Have No Idea

Not only are parents missing what’s happening with their kids, this miscommunication goes both ways:

“Jones and his team were surprised to find similar disagreement in the other direction, between children’s downplayed reports of their thoughts versus what their parents saw as troubling indicators. A significant number of teenagers denied they had thought about suicide or death, even though their parents told the researchers they had.”

What this tells me, even as someone who is no expert on parenting, is that we are not having open, transparent conversations around mental health, suicide, depression, anxiety, etc. When we see this lack of awareness within a family, we can safely assume the larger society is not having enough of that conversation too.

We aren’t. Ironically, in a world where we can connect with anyone at anytime through technology, we aren’t connected enough to have frank conversations about our own mental health.

I don’t know how you create change at that level, other than one person, one relationship, at a time.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/parents-teens-suicide_n_5c38dfc4e4b0e0baf53d3748