Mother's Day Musings for Mental Health Awareness Month

 A parent is only as happy as their unhappiest child. When you have a child who struggles with a mental health condition, you realize how alarmingly true this truism is. I was so desperate and distraught when my son Noah was in crisis, I couldn’t think clearly about how to communicate with him or help him. Nor could I fully take in information that might have helped guide our family through those terrible months before his suicide.

I’m reminded of that nightmare time today, Mother’s Day, during Mental Health Awareness Month, when the media is full of reports on mental illness and the failures of our mental health system. Tears spring when I read about other mothers with kids in despair. Like the mother on suicide watch with her 12-year-old son, who was waiting for an opening in an inpatient treatment center. “It was the scariest two weeks of my life,” the mother said. There was a poignant photo of her with her arm around her son, sitting under a tree in the dark, heads bowed. Or the mother of a precocious, deeply depressed adolescent who lay with her arms around her son’s broken body in a hospital bed after the boy jumped from their apartment building roof. “I just held him and caressed him,” she said, knowing he wouldn’t survive. I did the same nine years ago when I held Noah’s head in my lap on the floor of the garage, waiting for the paramedics after a neighbor did CPR. I stroked my son’s warm skin and called his name over and over, knowing he was gone.

At least, I think, the 12-year-old boy was still young enough that he was afraid and agreed to a safety plan. At least, I think, his mother could keep him on a suicide watch. Why didn’t we do the same? What was it about Noah that made us worried sick but not so vigilant as to supervise him 24/7? Noah suffered for two years but my husband and I saw little of it in person; he was away at college or on his own in another city on a year off from college. We saw mainly the beginning and the end of Noah’s struggle with clinical depression, anxiety and PTSD. At ages 20 and 21, he wouldn’t talk with us about it or let us talk with his therapists; we couldn’t even make an appointment for him with a psychiatrist. The sense of helplessness and ignorance—his and ours—was devastating.

The personal is the political – another truism. Each of these wrenching stories is part of a larger problem. There’s the shortage of treatment options, the rise in child suicide, the surge in depression and suicidal thinking during the pandemic, the dearth of mental health awareness and education. Just as the pandemic has exposed so many fault lines in our society, so, too, has it laid bare the shameful gap between mental health care needs and available services.

The crisis in our mental health system may not affect most people directly – until it does. It’s never too late to inform ourselves and everyone around us about mental health and suicide prevention, never too late to have the “mental wellness” talk with our children or advocate for the accessible, quality mental health care that all our families deserve. Out of love for our children, living or dead, struggling or thriving, let’s commit ourselves to action for mental wellness this Mother’s Day. (Including our own self-care!)

To my fellow survivors: This can be a tough day for those of us who have lost a child, especially if the loss is recent. It may help to check out my blogpost,  this reflection by a mourning mom  or the many resources of the Alliance of Hope for Suicide Loss Survivors.