What to Do If Your Child Attempts Suicide

It’s devastating, frightening – maybe even maddening – when a child attempts suicide. They’re so young. They have so much life ahead of them. And they tried to die.

Parents and caregivers agonize about how to help prevent this nightmare from happening again. Here are some tips, based on my own practice as a psychotherapist helping people with suicidal thoughts and behavior, and based on the recently released film After Your Child’s Suicide Attempt.

1. Get help.

I hope this goes without saying, but I want to be clear just in case. If the suicide attempt just happened, go to an emergency room for a medical evaluation, even if the child looks uninjured. For example, taking too many Tylenol (acetaminophen) might not create ill effects immediately, but it can be fatal over the course of 5 days.

A mental health evaluation is also needed after a suicide attempt, and a hospital emergency room can provide that. If you’re in doubt about whether to take your child somewhere for help, call 988 for advice if you’re in the U.S. or Canada. (You can find other countries’ crisis hotlines here.)

Immediate help is important, and your child needs help afterward, too. A therapist. A psychiatrist. Maybe a DBT skills group or something else to help build coping skills. It also can be helpful to coordinate with your child’s school, so they can alert you to problems and help keep your son or daughter safe.

2. Manage your emotions.

Don’t get mad at your child for attempting suicide. I know, emotions don’t obey “keep out” signs, so let me add: If you do get mad, don’t show it. Your child needs your love and care right now, not your judgment or anger. Hold in mind that you and your child are on the same side. They’re not hurting you with their suicidal urges. Their suicidal urges are hurting both of you.

You also might feel many other emotions – devastation, fear, guilt. Be careful about sharing those openly with your daughter or son. You don’t want them to hide their pain from you in an effort to protect you, do you? You feel what you feel – as I said, emotions don’t follow instructions – but you can try to direct where you express those emotions, and with whom. (And if you do overshare with your child, forgive yourself and just try to be more mindful moving forward. We are, all of us, only human.)

3. Don’t blame yourself.

Many, if not most, parents feel like their child’s suicide attempt reflects on the parents or their parenting. As one mom says in the film After Your Child’s Suicide Attempt: “The first thing you want to know is, why didn’t I see this? How come I didn’t know this was coming? What were the signs? How did I miss it?”

You can do everything right, and still your child might become suicidal. John Ackerman, PhD, suicide prevention coordinator at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, says in the film, “The myth that a good parent would not have a child who would attempt suicide is one of the most pernicious and problematic myths out there, because there are an incredible number of amazing parents, and just normal parents, and parents who struggle, who have kids who engage in suicidal behavior.”

Of course, there may be things you can improve or stop doing, particularly if you’re being outright abusive or neglectful. But the hurts we inflict on our children often are accidental byproducts of living: a word said too harshly, a consequence for a failing grade, an unwelcome rule to protect your child’s safety.

Keep in mind that suicidal thoughts and behaviors are bigger than any one person. Suicidality is what academics clumsily call “multicausal” – there’s never only one reason why.

4. Listen bravely.

Brave listening is asking the questions whose answers you fear and listening to what’s hard to hear – all while “resisting the temptation to change the subject, give advice, lecture, offer reassurance, or convince the person to think or feel differently,” as I say in my most recent book Loving Someone with Suicidal Thoughts: What Family, Friends, and Partners Can Say and Do.

Brave listening means hearing your child out without telling them they’re wrong to feel the way they do, without guilting them by saying things like “How could you hurt me like this?”, without immediately jumping in with problem-solving or advice or encouragement.

There may be a time and place for trying to help your child feel better, change their outlook, and solve problems. But not when you’re listening. Premature problem-solving can shut down a person’s honest disclosures. Think about it: do you keep confiding in someone if it seems like they can’t – or don’t want to – hear what you have to say?

5. Create a safety plan with your child, if you haven’t already.

Also called a crisis plan, a safety plan created by you and your child lists potential triggers and warning signs of a suicidal crisis in your child, things the child can do for distraction if they experience suicidal thoughts, people they can turn to for help, and ways to keep your home safe. (This last point is so important I’m addressing it separately, in the next tip.)

Don’t create the plan yourself and just hand a copy to the child. “It’s really important your child have a lot of input into this plan, because otherwise they’re not going to adhere to it,” Sherry Molock, PhD, an associate professor of clinical psychology at George Washington University, says in the film.

The Stanley-Brown Safety Planning Intervention website provides a blank safety plan at no charge. You can also create your own. And there are free safety planning apps, like Safety Plan and Suicide Safety Plan, for phones and tablets.

6. Make your home safe.

If you own firearms, please get them out of the house – or at least lock them up unloaded, with the ammunition stored separately, keeping in mind that kids can often thwart locks and discover hiding places. You can also get a cable lock or other kind of device that makes the firearm inoperable while locked. All of this might sound like obvious advice, but nearly 1 in 3 parents of adolescents with a known mental illness don’t lock up or otherwise secure the firearms in their home.

Even if you don’t have a gun, your home has plenty of potential weapons, such as knives, ties, household cleaners, and painkillers. Even over-the-counter painkillers are dangerous. It’s worth investing in a small safe to secure these items. Or you could install a lock on a closet, cabinet, or basement door and store everything dangerous there.

One father interviewed in After Your Child’s Suicide Attempt installed a lock on a closet door. “That was an inconvenience,” he says. “We were not able to access things that we were normally used to accessing. But at the same time, it did provide sort of a modicum of confidence that our child was not going to be able to easily attempt suicide – that there would be some effort involved that would hopefully prevent them from doing so.”

Unfortunately, you can’t entirely suicide-proof your home. You can, at least, reduce the dangers. This is a crucial step in creating a safety plan.

7. Keep checking in.

Ask your child if they’re thinking of attempting suicide again. You might use a daily rating scale: “How safe are you today from acting on suicidal thoughts, on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being completely safe?” That kind of shorthand can make it easier to check in quickly day to day, but also be ready for the big conversations, too.

8. Get support for yourself, too.

As a parent or caregiver of a child who attempted suicide, you’re almost certainly under immense stress. And you might feel alone with the problem, whether because you’re a private person, you fear stigma, or you just don’t know anyone dealing with the same kind of situation. Therapy can help you, and so can support groups.

The National Alliance on Mental Illness offers support groups for parents of children (including adult children) with mental illness. Your child’s physician, psychiatrist, or therapist might also know of potential groups. And there are support groups for parents on Facebook, like Support Group for Parents of Suicidal Teens and Parents of Depressed and Suicidal Children.

There are other resources, too, for parents and caregivers of children with suicidal thoughts or behaviors. One is my own book Loving Someone with Suicidal Thoughts.

9. Maintain hope.

You probably hear more about children and adolescents who kill themselves than you do about the kids who attempt suicide and go on to live good, long lives. It’s tragic when anybody dies by suicide, of course. Those deaths are the exception, not the rule. As one father in the video states, “As long as your child is alive, there’s hope. There’s a future. It doesn’t stop after there’s a suicide attempt.”

10. Watch the film yourself.

You might have gotten the idea by now that I highly recommend the 55-minute film “After Your Child’s Suicide Attempt.” Full disclosure: I’m interviewed in it. So is my husband Pete! (We’re both suicidologists and parents whose child was suicidal as a teen, and I’m a suicide attempt survivor.)

The film is a joint project of Zero Suicide at EDC and the group Parents to Parents (P2P). (P2P also created the film American Tragedy, among others.)

“After Your Child’s Suicide Attempt” can be viewed for free here at the Zero Suicide site or on YouTube.

_{© 2024 Stacey Freedenthal, PhD, LCSW. All Rights Reserved. Written for Speaking of Suicide.}