OPINION: The Youth Suicide Epidemic Is a Preventable One
A mother shares her story of grief
I hope that you never experience the pain of losing a child to suicide. And I hope that no other parent has to go through something like that twice. Unfortunately, that’s what happened to our family.
My boys meant the world to me. Jackson loved animals, especially dogs, and he enjoyed being creative and inventive. Lucas had a big smile. He liked watching cartoons with his little brothers. He loved to read and he even tried to take up surfing as a hobby. Both of them were loved.
They also both dealt with mental health issues in the form of anxiety, depression and substance use. Lucas suffered from bouts of paranoia and psychosis while Jackson was diagnosed with ADD and ODD. Neither received the kind of help they needed, and each of their lives ended way too soon.
In December 2017 we were living a comfortable life in a nice home in a beautifully wooded Northern California neighborhood. I had spent much of the day Christmas shopping and then came home to find that my oldest son Jackson was not in the house. I assumed that he was out visiting friends, which he said he might do, but then he didn’t come home that night.
We called the police. They told us to be patient. We woke up and he still wasn’t there. The police came by. There wasn’t much they could do. It was later that morning when I heard my husband scream from the backyard that I knew Jackson was gone.
That nightmare repeated itself three and a half years later when I got a text from Lucas’ best friend that he had sent an image of the Golden Gate Bridge with a goodbye. It was hours before it was confirmed that he had jumped. They have yet to recover his body.
How do you begin to deal with such loss as a parent, especially when you have other children to raise? How do you even begin to heal, especially when it happens not once, but twice?
Our family needed a fresh start; we needed to find a home where the memories weren’t so thick and where every sports field we passed or school event we attended didn’t immediately make us think of them.
So, we decided to move across the country to Davidson, North Carolina. We found friends and neighbors. We got settled and I began volunteering with NAMI Charlotte, a mental health advocacy non-profit. Volunteering helped me to find community and purpose while learning to live with the grief.
Suicide is the third leading cause of death for youth ages 10-18, and it affects families more than we realize. According to the NC Department of Health and Human Services, for every youth suicide in 2022 there were 11 hospitalizations and 59 emergency room visits for self-harm.
According to the nonprofit NC Child, over 9% of high school students in North Carolina attempted suicide in 2023.
The issue is complicated and every story is unique. But we know enough to try and make a difference, save lives and keep other families from becoming a statistic.
The place to start is through early detection, diagnosis and then treatment of mental health conditions. We should pay attention to warning signs and make treatment more accessible. We should make mental health care a required part of any health insurance coverage.
We should treat mental health the same as any other condition. And we should meet teenagers where they are.
That’s why I support the Jason Flatt Act in North Carolina, which would provide suicide prevention training to school personnel, who can often be on the front lines in recognizing the symptoms of mental illness and/or suicidal ideation.
The bill is named after a young man who died from suicide and whose story is similar to Jackson and Lucas. We owe it to them and to so many others who died so tragically.
Read more: CMS Struggles to Confront Youth Mental Health Crisis (2023)
I used to think that my story was just sad, but I have come to realize there’s hope in it. I am still a wife and a mother to my three wonderful, surviving children, and there is a lot of work for me to do.
That’s why I will continue to share about Jackson and Lucas — their lives and their struggles — so that we can try to prevent the tragedy of youth suicide from happening to someone else.
Meghan Talbott is a secretary and volunteer coordinator with NAMI Charlotte, the local chapter of an organization of families, friends and individuals whose lives have been affected by mental illness.
