our youth need us now more than ever

​As part of my job, I help monitor federal funding that goes out to Virginia communities for substance abuse prevention and mental health wellness efforts - with a special focus on our youth.

Once a year, I conduct a monitoring visit of these communities. I've been conducting the 2021 virtual visits the last two months. One theme has come from them that isn't new, but the trend of the theme is alarming. Especially because I have youth I call my sons.

I disconnected from more than one of those calls with tears in my eyes and in my heart. Because this is clear, our young people - like adults - are choosing to end their own lives at unprecedented rates.

In my own little community here in Virginia, it's happened more than once already this school year. And as I talked to several communities across the state, I'm saddened by how very normal youth suicide has become.

Last week, the Surgeon General of the United States sounded an alarm with his advisory: Protecting Youth Mental Health. (Linked in the comments).

In it, you'll read statistics like the following:

*In 2019, one in three high school students and half of female
students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, an overall increase of 40% from 2009.

Read that again - and picture - one third of the kids in your local high school walking around feeling sad and hopeless - half of the girls. And the trend is NOT toward hopeful.

Those numbers are PRE pandemic. One frightening number the report gives since the pandemic began:

*In early 2021, emergency department visits in the United States for suspected suicide attempts were 51% higher for adolescent girls and 4% higher for adolescent boys compared to the same time period in early 2019.

(If you wonder about the discrepancy in the numbers for girls and boys - two things - girls are more likely to seek help, and boys often use more deadly means when attempting suicide).

I have a young college student who works for me. She went to the same high school my oldest son goes to. Years ago, she survived one of those youth suicide attempts. She was one of those numbers.

I was talking to her about this yesterday. We were talking about these numbers and trends. She said I just feel a heaviness; I feel desperate. I could see that in her eyes.

Somehow, we ALL need to get there. We ALL need to get to feeling heavy and desperate.

Somehow, we ALL need to get to a point of seeing this as not another crisis, but as an epidemic of our kids hurting: persistently sad and hopeless.

Somehow, we ALL need to get to a point of seeing this as not a crisis, but as a growing agreement among our kids. Before they even finish high school, our kids are collectively coming to believe life isn't worth living.

You know, as a culture, I believe more and more every day that we know how to be emotional. But we have no idea how to manage those emotions. We know how to stir them up in one another, but very few of us have any idea what to do with them once they are stirred up.

Mainly, because too many of us have built relationships geared to hide from the hard emotions, not navigate them together.

And so here are our kids - with all of these emotions - and with brains, because of where they are in their development, living in a land of far more emotions than logic - having no idea what to do with any of it.

All our kids want - whether they know it or not - is just some way to manage it all. More and more, they are turning to people who have no answers.

As adults, too few of us have people we can comfortably turn to and say, "I am sad" - "I am hurting" - "I am scared" - "I am thinking about taking my life." So we've unknowingly - and sometimes knowingly - put up walls to protect ourselves from having those conversations at all.

On the outside of those walls, dying because they can't find a way in - are our kids.

I encourage you to read the Surgeon General's report linked in the comments below. The majority of the report focuses on what we can all do.

I think it starts with us being more open to exploring other people's emotions and less committed to dictating the terms of them. I think it starts with us being more open to exploring our OWN emotions, and finding the circles in our lives who are lovingly willing to help us navigate them.

And also, maybe more so, invite our kids into those circles. Because they need us now more than ever....