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If you take nothing else from what I’m about to say, take this: you will not cause suicide by asking someone directly if they’re thinking about it.

The mental health world has firmly renounced the idea of not asking someone directly. And I’m hoping to get as many people as possible to understand this and to jettison silence. You might be the lifeline they didn’t know they were allowed to grab.

Shipping your 15 year old who has significant mental health struggles off to a boarding school is definitely a choice. They claim it was a school that specialized in mental health, but then how would a place that specialized in mental health also not prevent a kid from killing herself?

Being shipped off and treated like a problem child surely did not help her at all. The lesson of this expose isnt “we should have talked about suicide more directly”. Its the unwritten subtext that elides how they should have done a shitload of things differently, and they dont even want to let themselves come to that realization. “I must have just not talked directly enough about suicide”. How about: maybe you should have kept your daughter close to her family instead of shipping her away just because she was hard to deal with sometimes…