You are listening to Feeding the Mouth That Bites You with Ashley Parrish and Jessica Pfeiffer.

A weekly podcast guide on parenting teens and launching them into the world. As always, we are

joined by psychologist and author, Dr. Ken Wilgus.

Hey everyone and welcome back. On today's episode, we will be continuing our discussion on self-harm and suicide.

Like last week's episode, this topic can contain some sensitive material. So please be mindful

of little ears that may be listening and maybe pause this podcast to listen when you have a few

minutes alone. This is a difficult conversation and our hope is that it will be helpful

and encouraging to you as you parent.

Well, let's dive more into suicide because I feel like this is a topic that I don't know much about.

And if I think about it, a lot of fear does rise up. And I don't want to be a fearful parent.

And I want to understand it more. And I want to give our listeners good wisdom and tools so that they can understand it more as well, because I would like to assume that a lot of them are like myself.

So let's talk more about suicide.

What is the motivation behind suicide for these teenagers?

Right.

Well, I'll never forget going to a really good continuing education from a researcher on suicide.

And this guy starts the seminar, starts the day-long seminar by saying,

do you ever think about how do we get statistics on suicide?

How do you get data? And I've thought, no, I never thought about

that. He said, you have to recognize that means that somebody is going to contact surviving

family members of someone who killed themselves and asked them, so what was going on with this person?

Did they say anything? Were they alcoholic? And he said, you know,

that's really hard research to do. It's really hard research to even do, much less how do you

...