Dear 21st Century Dad, twelve years ago my sister died and I adopted her beautiful five year old. As a thirteen year old, she began to get in trouble at school, changed her set of friends for a rougher crowd, and got caught for shoplifting. She gained a lot of weight and developed a real self esteem problem. My father suffered with depression so I know it has been in and around our family history for longer than I know.
Our family is very resourceful. We found a compassionate doctor whom our daughter thought was really cool. An older cousin stepped in as a miraculous mentor. We got her over the hump. There have been a couple of times she relapsed. Both times she was not doing her medication, but she started the meds again.
Then, last week the school called about three missed time blocks at school. On an intuition, I looked through her bedroom and discovered a suicide note.
We have had huge issues over privacy. The last time, she ended up shoplifting and staying out of the house for three days. What am I to do?
Dear Heart in a Vice Grip,
There is no lesson to be learned by the person who commits suicide. It’s all over. We have to protect her.
Depression imposes a mental shroud on its victim so dense, narrow and black that its victims can be self destructive. Making the situation worse by confronting our daughter with inflammatory and incriminatory evidence that is also an invasion of her privacy may push her over her limit of tolerance.
Sometimes, it’s better we don’t grab the bull by its horns.
What has worked for us before can work again. Call in the family protectors. Call in the family nurturers. Inform her teachers. Bring in her doctor again. Immediate treatment can lessen the severity and the duration of the depression. (She may need an adjustment in the pharmaceutical dosage). We need to listen with our whole attention as though we have listened to her before.
Have we fully accessed all the programs for youth that may help us deal with our daughter’s ill health?
In our town (Courtenay, BC) an innovative Girls Empowerment Project exists to provide support for adolescent girls. The three part program helps them to navigate their way through the pressures of social, emotional and physical changes. The program does more than just provide talk support. The girls can increase their social skills and their self esteem by graduating out of a Peer Facilitation Training program with the goal being to facilitate their own groups. The most interesting part of the program is the Community Activism and Legacy Project. The girls document the unique perspective of their world with cameras.
Another program, Youth And Ecological Restoration, takes children out into nature to restore the environmental health of local watersheds. The children are often waist deep in rivers counting fish or planting trees in deforested riversides. The culmination of the project requires the child to give a speech to members of the watershed restoration group. The speech is a profile builder that boosts the child’s self esteem. All that and they get to enjoy nature!
These programs and their like recognize that the power of creativity fosters a tremendous energy that can transform the negative into the positive. Robert Thurman writes in “Infinite Life: Seven Virtues For Living Well”, that heroic creativity can overcome self loathing and fulfill our obligation to improve the life of other troubled beings. Planting a tree grants tremendous powers to the holder of the shovel. A camera in a child’s hands collapses the walls of despair.
Yes, even though medical needs supercede privacy issues, we can still step lightly. A positive step would be to support and encourage our daughter to pursue a path of creativity. Treatment implies dysfunction and limitation. Creativity corrals all the madcap potentials that life offers opens gates to mind worlds never before perceived.
*The Queen Alexandra Foundation For Children (Victoria, B.C.) provides partial financial support for both services.
Google:
1.The Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention Centre of British ...
2.Crisis Center + (your town or city)>
3.Teaching Multicultural Literature . Workshop 1 . Teaching ...
4.Queen Alexandra Foundation For Children (Victoria, B.C.)
Key into YouTube:
1.UNICEF: Peer counseling programme in Malaysia mentors...
2.Peer Counselor Video 2
3.Peer Counseling Commercials
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