Troubled Teens Resources

Teen crisis intervention is most emphatically indicated when a teen attempts suicide. If there is any time that a family should pursue professional counseling and teen help for themselves and their troubled teenager, it is in the aftermath of a teen’s suicide attempt. Yet, unfortunately, only 30% of affected families do enter therapy.

“…families desperately need support and direction after a child attempts suicide. Depression, which leads to suicidal thinking, affects the entire family unit. To move past the tragedy, families must address the issues that the suicide caused, and continues to cause, in their lives. Chief among the issues is the family’s increased sense of responsibility for the child who attempted suicide. Worried about a repeat suicide attempt, family members, and parents in particular, feel that they have to watch their child constantly—in some cases, sleeping at the foot of the child’s bed every night to make sure he or she won’t attempt suicide.”

Families need help finding balance in their handling of a suicidal teen. There is an balancing act that has to be maintained between intrusive and claustrophobic protection and being vigilant. Complicating matters further is the mental state of the parent or sibling who may have discovered his or her brother after the attempt.

“Often siblings are just as stressed out as the parents because they find the brother after the overdose, or they are the ones in the background while Mom and Dad and the brother are having all of the conflict…
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Working with therapists… patients… learn skills to cope, ways to self-soothe and to seek out sources of support other than their parents.
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Parents, in turn, learn how to listen and not overreact.”

(source)

The link above will provide a list of symptoms to look for.