Editor’s note: This article is the fourth installment in a continuing series exploring different aspects of the youth mental health crisis. It contains stories about suicidality. Two interviewees’ names have been withheld at their request to respect their families’ privacy.
By MELISSA WHITWORTH
In the last seven or so years, Betsy Sharma has helped more than 50 parents with children who have tried to commit suicide.
“I’ve said it this way for years: I am a member of a terrible club and I wish no one else membership in it, but I have a real connection to the other members of that club that’s special and fortifying in a very deep way. There’s nothing like it, and there is no amount of strength I can get from a hospital or a clinician or another person who has not been through it.”
Sitting in the hospital ER after a child has been through an attempt on their life is an experience she knows well. For several years during 2018 and 2022, her daughter, now 18 and thriving, had made several attempts.
A roadmap telling Sharma what to do next never came.
Alongside her daughter, Sharma was awash with trauma, had no idea what her options were for keeping her child safe — let alone get her well again — and above all, she said, she felt deeply alone.
As a result, Sharma has turned that lonely experience into becoming a beacon for parents experiencing the very worst crises alongside their children. She hopes, she said, that anyone in the same place would call her.
“I hope you would call me at two in the morning and say, ‘This mom is beside herself. She’s sitting in the ER with her kid. Can she call you?’ I’ve done it for 50, maybe 75 people. I hope I can continue to do that.”
A resident of Mount Kisco, Sharma has also been part of the planning process for Northwell Health and Northern Westchester Hospital coming initiative to change the way children in crisis are treated. That initiative when piloted on Long Island reduced ER visits for children in crisis by 60 percent and hospitalizations by 98 percent.
Like Dr. Vera Feuer, the child psychiatrist leading implementation of the initiative, Sharma believes that children and adolescents should never reach that point of crisis. Only through bitter experience has she learned what to look for, and how to guide other parents. And her daughter, alongside her, has become an advocate too.
Speaking about her daughter, who is now a freshman at college, Sharma said, “She has handled it beautifully. And she’s so easily able to reflect on her experience and talk about it. I don’t want to sensationalize and I don’t want to breach her privacy and I don’t want to say something she doesn’t want her friends to potentially read. And repeatedly she has said, ‘If it will help, say it. Just say it.’”
“The sort of niche that I’ve found where I can be of the most help and use is as somebody who has been there. I’ve become comfortable saying this: ‘I’m an expert in the logistics of managing this and going through it. I’m not trained in psychiatry, I’m not a medical doctor, I’m not a social worker.’ But that’s not what the caregiver needs.”
“The caregiver needs care for him or herself to understand how to think about what’s coming. Because once it gets to the point of needing an emergency room visit, from that moment on — you don’t understand until you’ve been through it — that you are starting not a seven- to 10-day process. You’re starting a yearslong process that your child has had years to become accustomed to. I was thrown into it in a matter of moments. It’s a major mindset shift and there’s no help to make that shift for the caregiver.”
“Marina” (a mother in Pound Ridge who asked that her real name not be used) wishes that there was more solidarity and less fear amongst parents. Her son struggled after an intense relationship and then breakup with a girlfriend. He had been expressing suicidal thoughts and had written a letter saying so. Another mother knew of the letter, but said nothing.
“Even though it has gotten better,” Marina said, “there’s still a lot of stigma attached to going to see the school psychologist or social worker or even to go to a guidance counselor. Many kids may feel uncomfortable seeking help from a professional. I believe that a significant number of issues in middle school stem from interactions with their peers.”
Marina mentions bullying, getting into sexual relationships at a young age, drinking, and taking drugs as common stressors and maladaptive ways of coping with anxiety and depression.
“So going to someone — a parent or counselor — for help you feel like you are telling on someone else. They fear, ‘Is it going to lead me to get into more trouble with my peers?’”
Bullying has become especially challenging in the age of rampant social media use, she said.
“It’s truly overwhelming; there’s no escape. Unlike when I was younger, when gossip was limited to school and the occasional phone call, today’s bullying is relentless, pervasive and inescapable,” she said. “For him, it effectively marked the end of his social life. This led to much anxiety and depression.”
Then the pandemic arrived. For her son, Marina said, this was somewhat of a blessing in disguise because it took him out of the social situation that was causing him to lose all sense of self-esteem and sink into depression. Once Marina found out about the letter in which her son described wanting to commit suicide, she was terrified.
“It was so scary,” she said. “I had to hide every medicine. Anything sharp in the house.”
Her son spent time in an inpatient facility where he was stabilized and then did an intensive outpatient therapy program, which included three days per week spent at the hospital.
“Community is so important and all of us working together as a community,” she said. “When I think back to the mother who knew about my son’s letter … if I am concerned about a child, I call my friends, I call my son’s friends’ moms and say, ‘He’s pulling back, he’s not acting himself. I hope I’m not stepping on any feet, but I’m concerned.’ I think it’s important even when they’re in high school, perhaps even more important.”
“Genevieve” (a Katonah mother who also asked that her real name not be used) has two children both of whom struggle with anxiety, ADHD and other diagnoses. “Not everyone is talking about the fact that kids are different these days, just on a fundamental level, whether it’s biological or the environment,” she said. “And, when you look at the different generations, the styles of parenting were so different, too.”
“When I grew up in the ‘80s, and we were the latchkey kids, we would come home, and in my case, the door was just unlocked,” she continued. “We got ourselves a snack, we went outside and played with our friends, and we came home when the street lights went on. Our parents were making up for what their parents didn’t do, and then our generation made up for that by hovering, or helicopter parenting.”
“This is a different generation of kids. I have two nieces who are both 13 and live in different large cities in the South, and they, along with my daughter, all take anxiety medication. Three different types of parents, three different environments, three very different types of children, but they all need anxiety medication, while only one of the six parents struggles with anxiety.
“I think the hard thing for people to really wrap their heads around is that we aren’t able to take that broad difference into account and structurally change things so that it works for them. We need total systemic change. Instead we think, ‘This is what we did. This worked for us. I don’t understand why it can’t work for them.’”
In October 2024, in advance of an event aimed at raising funds for their new adolescent mental health program, which does aim at making systemic change, Sharma sent a note to Northern Westchester Hospital. In it, she wrote:
“For years, I have worked hard to be that friend-of-a-friend for parents to call for logistical support when navigating care for their child’s mental health. By building these programs for adolescent mental health care, Northern Westchester Hospital can be that friend-of-a-friend to everyone in our community. I am so thankful to know that, with NWH’s implementation of these new systems, families will be able to approach their children’s mental health care with the knowledge, and comfort, that there is a solid, predictable and expert network — a blazed trail, and even a guide to walk it alongside you already in place to support our community’s treasured young people; and, ideally, to prevent an adolescent mental health care need from ever becoming a crisis in the first place.”
The next article in this series will feature the voices of our students, who will share their perspectives on the mental health challenges their generation is facing.