Learning the Hard Way, Part 1

on parenting teens through mental illness

With one day to spare! My second monthly post for paid subscribers.  

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Today I begin to share some of the things I’ve learned while parenting teenagers with serious mental health issues.

It’s been a long journey for us–I wrote about some of our story in Hope: A User’s Manual, and am grateful that Caroline has worked through a lot of unmitigated crap and is, as of this writing, kicking butt in college as a newly minted psychology major with plans to be a teacher. 

With our middle kid, we’ve been in what Ted Lasso calls the dark forest part of the story for quite a long time. If we start the clock when Caroline first said “help,” we’re now in year five. Year five of heavy-duty depression parenting, which has included extended absences from school, searches for therapists, waiting lists, treatment programs, and maddeningly long searches for the right medication. 

But “year five” is misleading. Our kids were struggling long before we knew they were struggling, which is one of many things we’ve had to come to terms with as parents of kids with mental illness: the signs we missed, or misinterpreted; the suffering that can happen right under the nose of attentive parents, even ones who are reasonably well educated on psychological health. 

This post has been brewing for a while, partly because I’ve been trying to figure out how to write about it without writing about it, if that makes sense. My middle kid is 17 and deserves all the privacy I can provide. I need to tell my story, not my kids’ stories, as much as possible. But it’s time to risk talking about it more widely.

A big caveat before we dive in. I’ve often joked that every book about parenting should include the subtitle And Other Tips and Tricks for Parenting MY Kid! Child-rearing gurus peddling cute acronyms and three-step solutions may have cracked the code on their own child, and I applaud them for it, but kids are unique and situations are distinct. Yes, there can be common themes and things to learn, and we wouldn’t have made it this far without the assistance of experts. Still, my kids’ experiences are a particular stew of toxic perfectionism in a type-A, high-achievement culture, and that isn’t every kid’s story. I’ll be using the second-person “you” throughout this post simply because it’s easier to picture myself talking to an imaginary reader, but please, in the spirit of twelve-step programs, take what you like and leave the rest.  

This got very long and I have much more to say, so consider this part one.

There are two main things I want to share today.

First:
Depression is a life-threatening illness. 

When a child is profoundly depressed–especially a teenager, who’s exerting appropriate independence from their parents and confiding in them less, who deserves some level of privacy, and who has access to a car… a credit card… friends you don’t know personally… life gets very scary. It’s a terrible feeling to realize there’s a chance my kid will not survive this. 

We had days like that.