A therapist and mother shares her family's experience with suicide and warns that warning signs are easy to miss. She's seen children as young as eight attempt suicide through cutting or overdose, and urges parents to ask their kids about struggling peers and alert schools immediately.
Good morning everyone, um, I hope that you all are doing well today, but I wanted to get up here to just really talk to you guys about suicide. Um, it was not my plan to do this vlog today about this. I was going to address this at a later date, but it was on my spirit real heavy last night to go ahead and to discuss this with you all for a few, for a few seconds. Um, recently in our family we had someone to commit suicide. And I was very heartbroken because a lot of signs were there that I wasn't aware of. I wasn't aware of what was going on with him, but when I was told what happened, the events that led up to it, I was like, yes, he definitely had some mental health things going on, but the family wasn't aware just how severe it was. So that led me to go ask my daughter. I said, you know, Zaria, you know, are you having thoughts of, you know, want to hurt yourself? Or, um, I said, no, Mommy. She said, I love, you know, my family. She said, I, you know, I love going to school. I don't have any problems with anything. I'm, I'm good. I said, you sure? So I always try to talk to her about things, but I also know that kids talk to each other in their age group. So I asked her, I said, Zaria, I said, what about at school? Has any of your friends ever told you they want to hurt themselves? She said, yes, Mommy, today. This was yesterday. This was last night. I said, baby, I said, what happened? She said, Mommy, she said, well, the little girl in my classroom was crying to me and she was saying that when she got home she was gonna get a knife, she was gonna cut herself, and that she was going to do it while her sister was upstairs doing her work or whatever. And so my heart was just so heavy and I told her, I said, you know, let's pray for your classmate. I said, tomorrow morning when we go to school, after your dental appointment, I said I will talk to your teacher and let her know what's going on. So, uh, that's what we did. Um, just now I'm leaving her school now after her dental appointment to go and talk to her teacher about what happened. And she told me she was wanting to address it and talk to her parents about it. But the little girl is at school today, praise God. But it breaks my heart that, you know, the little girl is only 6 years old, okay? And not only that, you guys, you know, you know I work in mental health, you know, I'm a therapist. And we have so many kids who come, who refer to the agency that I work at for therapy because of suicide attempts. They actually try to commit suicide either by cutting themselves, taking a bunch of pills, um, all ages, as young as like 8 and 9 years old. And recently I had a mom call me yesterday telling me that her daughter told her doctor she had a plan to harm herself. This little girl has a healthy family. She is very blessed, um, and it breaks my heart because I'm telling you this, parents, because it's not always, you know, what are you doing wrong. You could be doing— you could be doing everything right, but your child could still be under attack. They could still have those thoughts that come to them, and they don't tell you because they don't want you to worry, or they're scared to say anything to you about it, but they'll tell their peers about it before they tell you. And so, um, I see a lot, a lot more than what is really advertised. I know that suicide prevention is very prevalent now and people talking about it more, and they're, you know, trying their best to make people more aware, but we could always do more. And so, you know, in the weeks to come, I'm going to discuss suicide, um, even more. Um, praise God, I've never had a client that actually commit suicide. I'm so thankful for that. But there are people that do it every single day, every single day. So parents, talk to your kids, um, ask your kids if there are other kids in their classroom who, um, were telling them that they want to commit suicide. So I wanted to just, um, share that with you all today, to just be aware and, um, to be woke and to be prayerful. Um, you guys have a great day. Bye-bye.
