Suicide Girls

In today's paper there is an article about a fourteen-year-old girl who committed suicide a few months ago. Of course I read every word of it, and by the end I was practically in tears. There were pictures of the girl, and of the father and stepmother sitting in her room, and it was just unbearably sad. What was interesting, though (interesting? ugh, but I don't know what would be an appropriate word), is how even as the article seemed to tell the whole story, it left out a crucial piece.

There was a thorough account of the girl's background, which was clearly chaotic: drug-abusing parents who both went to jail when she was a toddler, foster care, an erratic mother in and out of her life, mainly out. The father did pull himself together, got custody of the girl and her brother, and, by all accounts, tried as hard as he could to help her. He got DSS involved because she was so troubled, but when they put her in a residential facility he visited her every day, and when she came out, he was very attentive, trying to be both loving and firm as she stole from him, ran away repeatedly, refused to take her meds, etc. Even her friends said that he was a great dad, though he fully acknowledged the negative effects of his behavior in her early childhood. Along with the background, there was a pretty thorough account of the events that led up to her suicide, including of that day.

What was missing, though, was any discussion of how she felt. The article said that she would call her friends and talk about hurting herself, but they would talk her out of it (of course the day she hung herself, she didn't call). But it said nothing about her emotional experience. Surely, given how much difficulty she was having, she must have talked about her feelings--to her friends, her therapist, even her father?

I still want to know, then, what does it feel like to be a fourteen-year-old girl who wants to kill herself?

This is a question I've asked before. When I was nine, a fourteen-year-old girl who'd gone to my grade school committed suicide--she hung herself too. She was in high school by then, and I didn't really know who she was, but somehow she felt close to me. I was very upset by her death at the time, and then I thought about her for years, when I was fourteen, when my sister went to the high school she'd attended, whenever suicide came up. Years later, one of her teachers and a famous psychiatrist wrote a book about her. I remember skimming it fearfully in the bookstore, but I couldn't bring myself to read it.

I've often felt bad, very bad, as a child, a teenager, an adult. But I've never considered suicide, and I wonder what makes the difference.

Obviously I now approach this topic as the mother of girls who will eventually be fourteen, which makes it even more horrifying. How do you make sure this isn't your daughter some day?

Many years ago, in California, a good friend of mine worked at a clinic for runaways, kids who were drug addicts, prostitutes, living on the streets. I remember her saying that 100% of the kids she worked with came from abusive homes, and I've held onto that as a mantra. I'm raising my children in a stable, supportive, loving home and that will go a long way toward protecting them. But what if it doesn't go far enough?