1 in 4 young people are reporting Suicidal thoughts

Almost every suicidal crisis has at its center a strong ambivalence. Most people can be helped in getting through their moment of crisis if they have someone who will spend time with them, listen, take them seriously and help them talk about their thoughts and feelings. What most suicidal people want is not to be dead but some way to get through the terrible pain they are experiencing and someone they can turn to during those terrible moments of fear and desperation.

Having someone to talk to can make a big difference. However, you may need to be persistent before they are willing to talk. Talking about suicide or suicidal thoughts will not push someone to kill themselves. It is also not true that people who talk about killing themselves will not actually try it. Take any expressed intention of suicide very seriously.

While you may not be able to solve these problems for a friend or classmate, you may be able to help the person find someone who can help. Suicidal ideation is up among young people, with as many as one in four people ages 18 through 24 having seriously considered suicide. In the early days of the covid pandemic, many people came together to help each other, connecting over socially distant dinners and reaching out for video calls with friends they had not talked to in months.

Psychological data taken during the covid pandemic showed mental health is languishing.

In the general United States population, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that 11% of adults had seriously considered suicide. Among those identifying as Black or Hispanic, the numbers were worse. 19% of Hispanics reported suicidal ideation and 15% of Blacks reported suicidal thoughts. The results reflect a nation increasingly on edge.

People can not disconnect from this. Add on the pressures of the economy, the increased scrutiny on racial injustice, and the looming specter of the presidential election, and it is hard for many to feel like things might turn out okay. The emotional burden is falling more heavily on those who reported having been treated recently for mental, emotional, or suicidal issues.

In particular, the stress is disproportionately falling on the young. Young people are struggling and having a tough time. On an individual level, the main pillars of psychological health include eating healthy, staying active, getting enough sleep, and maintaining social connections. Oftentimes when we are in stress, it is hard to come up with a game plan.

Friends and family play that role. But figuring out healthy ways to socialize virtually can require being intentional. Passive thumbing through social media or “doom scrolling” does not constitute meaningful or supportive social interaction. If you are on social media it is better to try to directly engage with or respond to others. In particular, if someone you know or love stops engaging, that can be a sign that it is time to reach out. You can encourage them to seek professional help from a therapist or counselor.

The National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention recommends that those suicidal needing emotional support should call the Disaster Distress Helpline or text TalkWithUs.

And if you are experiencing a suicidal crisis, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or text the Crisis Text Line to get help. Even if you are not in crisis, it is crucial to find ways to maintain bonds with others and do what we can to support each other before someone enters into a crisis mode. As a community, we need to collectively re-amp up.

In 2020, most parents knew that their behavior had an effect on their children’s mental health, then and possibly forever. As such, parents strived to call upon their better angels, modeling equanimity and empathy as much as they could, with the small hope that these moments would outweigh the unhinged ones. There were times when it was easier, and times when it was harder.

For 2020, just in case anyone out there remained unclear, it was much, much harder. With the pandemic, school closures, the fight against racial injustice, the climate crisis, and political uncertainty, 2020 had made it difficult for anyone to reasonably hold it together. Added to that list raising the future caretakers of this vulnerable world. The good news was that children did not need parents to be pillars of strength amid the wreckage.

Nor did a parent’s anxiety or depression meant the child would inevitably experience anxiety or depression then, or in the future.

What mattered more than how unsettled we felt was how we dealt with these unsettling feelings. This was the case whether it was the parents or the children experiencing anxiety or depression. There was a long-established relationship between parent and child mental health problems. Children of parents with anxiety disorders were four to six times more likely to develop an anxiety disorder in their lifetime, and children of parents with depression were three to four times more likely to develop depression.

Often, these disorders appeared in childhood or adolescence. The why, however, remained uncertain. It was likely a combination of genetics, biology, and environment. Also, it was not always something that was passed from parent to child. A child’s behavior could impact his parent. It was a bit of a chicken-and-egg phenomenon. The relationship between parent and child was bidirectional and complex.

Sometimes the anxious child could elicit less parental warmth or overprotection. But no matter where and how mental illness started, something that might be impossible to pinpoint with precision, nobody was to blame. Mental health issues should be considered like any other illness. When it came to children experiencing anxiety and depression, it was rarely a parent’s own struggles with mental health that were the direct cause.

There was still this idea that it was all the parents’ fault.

People blamed parents for so many problems. This was not to say parents had no influence over their children’s mental well-being. Emotional suffering was inevitable. Life was painful and uncomfortable at some point for all of us. If you never experienced these feelings, you were likely neck-deep in denial or toxic positivity, and it was not benefiting anyone, least of all yourself.

Sometimes anxiety and sadness could be managed without professional help. And sometimes they were so strong that they qualify as a clinical disorder and demand professional help. Either way, denying this pain could cause our children and ourselves harm in the long run. The emotionally healthy thing to do, which was also the difficult and brave thing to do, was to acknowledge our struggles in front of our children and model a healthy response to them.

Children looked to parents to understand their reality and to understand the world. It started in infancy. This was a major way we learnt about what was safe and dangerous and happy and sad. Our children picked up on our verbal and nonverbal emotional cues, and tended to be more perceptive than we often gave them credit for. This was not to say we always needed to look calm.

When we felt anxious, we should acknowledge it head-on with our children in an age-appropriate manner.

When parents felt as though they were unraveling at the seams, they should start by taking care of themselves. In a culture that implicitly and explicitly encouraged parents to put their children’s needs over theirs, this might seem wrong or selfish, but it was for everyone’s good. Pressure-letting might take place through exercise, time off from work, a phone call with a friend, or therapy.

Find those little ways to recharge your battery. In addition to finding ways to help themselves, parents should also talk to their children about what was going on. It was scarier for a child to have a parent who was struggling and did not talk about it versus a parent who was struggling and did talk about it. Used words they understood. For young children, “sad” and “scared” were likely better choices than “depressed” and “anxious”.

Age-appropriate conversations about anxiety and depression could achieve a number of things. For one, talking to your children normalized these feelings and showed them that it was alright to acknowledge and express them. Secondly, communication ensured children knew a parent’s stress and anxiety were not their fault. Lastly, when parents talked about what they were doing to deal with these feelings, they were showing their children how to deal with hard feelings of their own.

Rather than engaging in unconstructive behaviors like catastrophizing, shutting down or yelling, parents should try to model coping behavior.

When it was the children who were anxious, parents should respect but not necessarily indulge their concerns. This might go against the deeply ingrained parental instinct to protect children from what scared them. But the line between protection and accommodation of unhealthy and irrational behaviors could be a slippery slope. Showed the child that you were confident that they could tolerate the stress and still be fine.

Let them know you believed they could handle it. Parents were like the mirror children look into to learn about themselves.