Suicide attempts and mental health issues

[ArchiesCastle]

A Dad, not a Mum here.

I have full time custody of my 14 year old daughter. She has been struggling with her mental health for some time now, with incidents of self harm, and sadly this week another attempt at taking an overdose which ended up at A&E, and fortunately failed.

I have been desperately trying to get support for her - through her school, also through Children's Services , but all that has happened so far is lots of forms being filled in, and her being placed on waiting lists for help, but no actual help. This has been going on for over a year now.

She is a bright child, but has missed lots of school because of her mental health problems, and she has her GCSEs next year. As things stand, I'd be surprised if she gets to take them, without some proper support being put in place.

Reading around about CAMHS, who we have yet to see, makes me feel quite discouraged - few people have anything good to say about them, and the waiting lists are enormous. Even after the suicide attempts, there has been no useful contact with them, apart from a brief call, and no advice on how to try and stop something like this happening again.

For those who have been through something similar - what other options are ? Did CAMHS ever help? Or would going private have been a better option in hindsight ? Can any charities help?

We need someone that can actually work with my daughter and help her deal with her specific issues, not just an organisation that hands out generalised advice on good practice to support mental health.

Experiences and thoughts welcome

The suicide attempt that she witnessed at 6 will be key information to let mental health professionals know about. My dad took an overdose in front of me when I was 17 and that was traumatic, so at 6 years old it would have been very damaging to her development. If anything, attempting suicide in front of a child is the ultimate abandonment by a caregiver, then her mum having her arrested and putting her up for adoption would have just leveraged the original abandonment trauma ensuring incredible mental pain for your DD.

To a child, parental abandonment = a literal threat to your own survival.

She will need a lot of care and understanding. What she has been through is severe and she is still young. It could well become EUPD. Even the apple pie is a trigger, was she ever denied food by her mum or anything like that?

As an example, my dad would get very angry with me as a child if he ever had to give me a lift in the car (as it meant he couldn’t get drunk). I still struggle now if I ask DH for a lift to the station and he can’t do it (for good reason) as it sets off something that says he doesn’t love me and I feel abandoned. But we talk about it, and I get through the triggers now. A solid calm relationship can be very healing.

DancesWithFelines

Thanks for your comments and thoughts

The food thing is interesting. There were issues with food with Mum when the children were younger , and I can remember the children making little placards and protesting against their Mum over what they were given to eat.

However, it's not a one-sided story . The children all wanted to eat junk food, all the time . My ex was, in most cases, trying to follow the recommendations of people like Children's Services and get the children to eat healthily . So it wasn't so much that they were denied food, but more denied junk food. However, as children they didn't really distinguish between these two scenarios.

If the child has such extreme reactions to things which could be classified as good parenting, then it can make them very difficult to parent, which contibuted to my ex's problems, when compounded with her own mental health issues.

A lot of these issues come back to nature vs nurture. Is the child behaving in a certain way because of the way they are, or because of the experiences they've had ? If the latter, then there seems to be a chance of change, if the former , not so much. But in my experience professionals seldom try and distinguish between these scenarios, and just assume change is always possible.

Goldensparrow

I understand that my daughter has been through a lot of difficult things, and that these will certainly have had an effect on her.

But there has been something of a shift in the way society views these things. The British used to have a reputation for having a 'stiff upper lip' and we coined the phrase 'keep calm and carry on'. Both of my parents lived through the second world war as children, and experienced things like German fighter plane attacks and unexploded bombs in their street. But somehow those experiences didn't traumatise them, and they developed into normal, well adjusted, loving parents . They only talked about these experiences when directly asked about them, they weren't a source of trauma for them forever after, and they were able to go on and have normal lives afterwards.

We've altered our perception as a society now about what people should be able to cope with, and how they should react to stressful situations. You could try and argue that there's nothing wrong with that, or even that it's healthy, and better, more in tune with people's feelings. But one undeniable effect of our change in attitude is that there are lots more people being traumatised by their circumstances than they used to be. And that has consequences too. For each traumatised person, there are often a whole load of others who are busy picking up the pieces for them. The doctors and nurses in A&E. The counsellors. The therapists. The parents who are desperately trying to arrange support. There's practically a cottage industry around my daughter of people trying to help, and often not getting very far, because the system is overloaded and can't cope.

My point is - who cares for the carers ? Who makes sure they aren't also traumatised by their experiences of being overworked and worried and fighting against a system that doesn't really seem to care? Someone has to be the strong one, to be there for the traumatised.

When my older daughter was being physically abusive to me, and I told Children's Services about it, do you know what their reaction was? That it was my fault. They said that families were a system. And that as the adult , I was in charge of that system. And therefore if I was being hit and kicked, the system was failing. And as the one in charge of that system, it was my fault and responsibility. So therefore , I was being punished for my own incompetence at running the system, in their view. Not that it was my daughter that was doing something wrong by abusing me.

But all you've done there is create a class of person whose feelings don't matter. Who are allowed to be abused and hurt, for the benefit of the other people. Because the feelings of another class of person, in this case the child, matter far more. In order to give the child carte blanche to be themselves and react how they like , even with violence, you have to minimise the importance of the feelings of the people around them. If the situation was reversed, and I was kicking and punching my daughter, I would have been locked up and the key thrown away.

Personally, I don't think it's necessarily a great message to say to one group of people 'your feelings and your experiences matter far more than anyone else's feelings and experiences'. It's not a message of love and respect for others. It's a message of lack of personal accountability.

I understand my daughter has had a tough time. I can understand that this might make her sad sometimes, despairing , feel alone, etc. But even taking that into account, I can't condone her using that as an excuse for cruelty, violence and taking it out on the ones who are trying to help you.

If you follow that logic to its ultimate conclusion, we all end up traumatised by what has happened to us in life, and therefore there's no-one able to be strong and support others, we're all just alone in our own traumatised personal hell. Someone has to stay strong, to be able to help others. But that doesn't or shouldn't imply that anything goes , as far as the strong person is concerned - they have to sacrifice themselves for the good of all the others. There has to be an expectation of reslience, and help for others to become that way too.

Nobody is saying it is okay for your daughter to physically attack you. But social services are right that a family is a system.
The example you give of food indicates you can't cope with your children disagreeing with you. It is normal for children to protest if told they can't have junk food, especially if they had been used to having lots of it.
I think the placards are ingenious and a sign of intelligence, not an extreme resistance reaction.
I wonder if it has progresssed to physical violence because you do not know how to deal with resistance and conflict from your children.

I see you reject every explanation of how your daughter is traumatised and the impact this will have by glib statements like we are all traumatised, or I am traumatised too.
Until you accept and understand what your daughter has been through, it's impact, and that it is your job to fix it, then I don't think anything will really change.
The beginning of the solution lies with you. This is what social services have already told you.

alloutofluck

Sorry, but it seems to me if there's anyone with a speciality in glib explanations for things they know little about, it would seem to be you.

You come across as yet another person, the type of which is very easy to meet these days,with 'victim mentality' . You seem to seek to label certain people , in this case my daughter , as a victim, and on that basis regard anything they say or do to anyone else as acceptable , and justifiable, on account of their victim status. Whereas you seek to identify other people as oppressors, and therefore anything that is done to those oppressors as justifiable and irrelevant, even the same ignominies that supposedly caused the other people to be victims.

Naturally it is much better to occupy victim status in such a polarised philosophy. So you, and others like you, seek to entrench their preferred groups of people into victim status, and push everyone else into oppressor status, which makes all the 'victims' actions excusable, however unkind they are and all the 'oppressors' actions inexcusable, however well meaning they are.

So here's a thought. Why not give up on the power games, and trying to secure more privileges for your preferred type of people. And simply accept that everyone has a right to be treated with courtesy and consideration. Regardless of what labels you might seek to attach to those people. And if someone treats others badly, they are intrinsically at fault. Not able to be happily excused for their actions, because you've chosen to paint them white in your philosophy.

Not one person has said that everything your daughter does is right. Instead they have tried to explain why your daughter is behaving the way she is and what you can do to change things,
You keep saying this is a victim mentality. Instead what you have is a take responsibility mentality I.E. none of this is my fault, it is my daughters fault as the trauma she has experienced should have no impact at all on how she behaves as a child. So the problem must be her. Nothing to do with me.
You are the parent. It is your responsibility to tackle the issues and change things. You are the one refusing to take responsibility

You seem to forget your daughter is a child and you are her father, in all your talk about victims and oppressors.

alloutofluck

What's more, you don't seem to have the patience or attention to detail to actually read what has been written. The children were protesting against the way their mother handled them and food - not me. In which way I am 'unable to cope' with something done by a different, mentally ill parent?

By my reading of your posts , you seem to intrinsically lean towards anti-authoritarian behaviour, hence you admire their protest , even though in truth it is ultimately against their own interests to eat unhealthy things. That says more about you, and your own feelings about authority and 'victim status' than it does about how to get children to have a healthy diet .

alloutotfluck

"you are the parent"

Precisely as I said. You separate people into two groups - in this case parent and child. And you give all responsibility for everything that happens to the parent, and none to the child.

The same logic was originally applied to children with autism, and also with schizophrenia . Doctors originally blamed autism in children on 'cold mothers' who didn't show their children
enough affection when they were born , and created a term schizophregenic for mothers who supposedly induced schizophrenia in their children. Both explanations for the child's behaviour are of course nonsense, but that didn't stop thousands of mothers being blamed and shamed by people like you, who desperately seem to want to believe that everything comes from nurture, and nothing comes from nature.

It is obvious that the experiences my daughter has had have affected her. How could they not ? But your rampant desire to pin everything about her behaviour and her suffering on her parents, with no responsibility at all for her says more about you, than me , I think.

I'm sorry for whatever in your life made you think this way, and I realise it is comforting to blame everything bad that happens in your life on some external party. But it just ain't so

The food example you gave as an extreme reaction by your children. I said I do not think it is an extreme reaction at all, more an ingenious one.
You keep saying that I have said you are totally responsible and your child has zero responsibility for their actions. I have never said that. I have said your responsibility is for how you parent. You have been given lots of tips on how to parent a traumatised child. Your response is always everyone is traumatised and your child is responsible for how she acts,
I am going to leave this thread now. Nothing is going to change unless you change.

alloutofluck

"I am going leave this thread now"

I think that's for the best. If you think telling a parent that their suicidal daughter's behaviour is all their fault, and nothing will ever change unless the parent does, then you appear very short on empathy and compassion to me. Apart from , as we've said, towards the people you identify as victim in the situation.

You give no credit to the parent that takes the child to hospital. Liaises with the doctors, campaigns for an ailing health system to do something, takes the child home, makes the home environment safe, tries to find support and therapy for the child...

Instead, you leap to conclusions, and seem to think the existence my daughter's pain alone is enough to condemn me, as if parents have a magic wand that can fix everything. And that I will always bear all responsibility for that until that pain stops. No responsibility for CAMHS, who won't even see her. No responsibility for her school, no responsibility for her GP. All responsibility for me.

I would very much like my daughter's pain to stop. But I cannot change the past, or the planet. She has to also build up resilience to cope with life as it is, not as she might wish it was.

I don't know if you followed up on my recommendation but please talk to Therese Langford. What's going on with your daughter is all at a subconscious level, which is why she can't control it.

Eyesopenwideawake

Thanks for the reference, and sorry if I missed referring to it directly earlier. I will follow up all the references in the thread. Generally, the discussion has been very helpful, and I've been appreciative of the thoughts and comments of the forum users.

Thank you for your input and your concern

Hello all,

Wanted to post an update on this thread.

We have now got to the head of the queue, and have recently started to see our local CAMHS. I have spoken in person to the lead professional, who is a psychologist a couple of times and exchanged various emails with her, although she is not especially communicative in her responses. Her training and background is as an art therapist. I am not clear how helpful this is in our case. Because I asked for it, a psychiatrist has also attended some of the sessions, because my daughter wanted to investigate the possibility of medication.

CAMHS seem reluctant, at the moment, to give any specific diagnosis to my daughter. They argue that this is because a diagnosis can be potentially stigmatising for a young person, and would stay with them for life, and that it will be easier to diagnose accurately when she is older. However, broadly speaking, they seem to agree that a diagnosis of BPD seems possible, and they think that learning 'DBT skills' would prove beneficial to her.

However, they have also admitted to me that they have no actual staff with the training that would allow them to deliver any actual DBT to my daughter, and so they are proposing instead to offer her development of 'DBT skills', by using YouTube videos, workbooks etc.

To try and deal with the general difficult family situation, they are also proposing to offer Family Therapy for me and my daughter, with additional 1 to 1 therapy for her, where she would learn, amongst other things, 'DBT skills'

They are also trying to involve, at the moment, one of their most senior consultant psychiatrists, although she has not commented to my knowledge so far about the case, and I haven't had any contact with her yet.

Given their lack of DBT skilled staff, I have asked them the question whether we would be better off getting some actual DBT in the private sector. I have also asked whether it would be possible to second someone from a different branch of CAMHS with those skills. No response so far to those questions.

My daughter is already struggling to engage with her therapy, and was only given a half session this week, because she didn't answer and talk to the therapist properly, and she has already tried to cancel her whole involvement with CAMHS, but then quickly changed her mind again. The self-harming and suicide threats continue.

My daughter struggles to accept the idea that she needs therapy, and that she is the one that is mentally ill, because she feels, from her perspective, that the world and the people around her are the ones that are ill, and we are the ones that should be in therapy, not her, and she struggles to see things from any perspective other than her own. This is not unusual for people with BPD, but makes it a challenge to get her to engage, and want to change her behaviour, and I am concerned that paying for private therapy will not necessarily improve the outcome, given her general reluctance to engage.

For those on this thread that work for CAMHS, I would appreciate any tips you have to get the best out of the system, and how I can secure the best help for my daughter, in such a tricky situation .