There is a reason children do not ask existential questions; in their minds, life as it is will never change. The future holds an eternal state of youth and an endless supply of Scholastic books and summer vacations. Family will forever represent security and comfort; it will always be something that is whole. Behind my young-self lay a trail of wreckage. It was the silent but not uncommon deterioration of a kid who couldn’t find the words for what she was going through. Trap

More than 800,000 people a year die by suicide and 500,000 others end up in the hospital with injuries related to self-harm. Queer kids rejected by their families are almost nine times more likely to make a suicide attempt than those who are accepted. Kids wonder why they must be different in a society that tells them they’d be better off dead than who they are. In 1973, just nineteen years before I was born, “homosexuality” was removed from the DSM. And still, society tells

I’m sixteen years old. I don’t understand why everything must be so complicated, why the pressure in my head builds rapidly until it finds a way out. It will be years before I learn to channel pain into creativity; for now, it’s a waiting game with no manual. The safest place I know is the driver's seat of my car, which cradles my back as today’s crisis works its way from the inside out. The nylon is resilient to constant stress and absorbs the sounds of my sadness without ju

A new study published in the Translational Psychiatry journal suggests that mental illness may affect children in earlier stages of development than previously thought. Ariana Enjung Cha (The Washington Post) reports that after interviewing over 100,000 subjects, researchers found that “depression in many children appears to start as early as age 11.” Parents, many of whom already face concern over the risk of adolescent suicide, now have reason to also monitor risk factors i