Teenage Suicide Attempts

[30struggle]

Please can someone help me, my DD attempted suicide twice just over 10 weeks ago - completely shocked us to the core. She is a bright and beautiful person but has low self esteem and lacks confidence. I tried to get her support for this over the last 2 years and she was starting to improve and become more positive about the future - going to university in September. But she recently had her heart broken by her first serious boyfriend which was the trigger for the overdoses. We have been through the NHS processes of Crisis Team and Mental Health Team but the help has been very poor. I feel completely out of my depth and live in constant fear the DD will try and take her life again. I really would like to hear from any other mums who have been through this and what advice would they give. I just need to know that there is light at the end of the tunnel not just this feeling of despair.

Give yourself space to process the shock.
It's not something to push past so you can support your dd - you need to show her good positive ways of coping.

Random but I joined a gym and started swimming and it got me through it.

Social work can sometimes be supportive if everyone else is overloaded. It's trickier with adult children though.

There are likely to be local projects that could help either you or her - community/therapeutic gardening or art therapy groups etc that you can self refer to rather than having to go through NHS.

Can you afford to pay for counselling or psychotherapy? Dance and movement therapy might be good for a young woman.

In my local area GPs are referring to the hospital chaplaincy service as a listening ear.

I'm not in any way wealthy but we've essentially switched to eating whatever's reduced to 10p in asda and that's allowed me to afford animal-assisted therapy for DS and the gym for me.

I've also been out in the garden a lot and DS has started reading out there and helping me.
I'm off to eat a 10p falafel salad and then we're finishing our hypertufa pot project. 5 months ago i wasn't sure if he'd still be with me this summer. It's a great deal to cope with tbh.