Christmas 1978
My brother and I, before innocence was lost.
As I reflected on the photos in this post, I did some research on suicidal ideation. I wondered how an innocent child could go from smiling to being trapped for forty years with an eating disorder, willing to throw her entire life away, resulting in heart failure and fibromyalgia. My struggle with anorexia, bulimia, addiction, and suicidal ideation has controlled my life since the age of 12 years old. Our family has struggled with such topics for four generations. While I feel bullying is often overused, both my brother and I were bullied throughout our childhood. My brother also struggled with addiction to escape the pain and passed away from brain cancer at the age of 31. I share these photos with the hope that you or your loved one finds my mental health workbook helpful, so you can avoid the turmoil my family and I endured.
Since the onset of social media and the COVID-19 pandemic, doctors are paying more attention to the warning signs of patients struggling with suicidal ideation. I wanted to include an important and simplified study on the topic of "who will attempt suicide." While I know, personally, that at my age there are other factors, after multiple attempts myself, this study is a LIGHTBULB MOMENT for all families raising children between 10 and their mid-20s. EDUCATING PARENTS IS KEY!!!!!!!
The medical profession keeps trying to predict "who will attempt suicide." Researchers followed 2,060 Brazilian children from age 10 and into their mid-twenties, one of the longest prospective suicide studies ever conducted outside a high-income country. They measured genetics, perinatal history, family psychiatric illness, childhood adversity, cognition, and clinical symptoms, then tested all of it together against those who later attempted suicide.
The result: even with multiple domains of risk factors combined, prediction accuracy remained modest, barely above the ceiling seen across 50 years of suicide research. More sophisticated machine learning models didn't do any better than simple logistic regression.
Three factors stood out as consistent, actionable, and population-relevant: childhood threat exposure (especially bullying), caregiver history of suicide attempts, and childhood externalizing disorders. Bullying alone accounted for the largest share of preventable risk in the entire study.
The author's conclusion is blunt: distal childhood risk factors will likely never predict individual suicide attempts with precision, because suicide is driven by acute, fast-acting processes that a baseline assessment can't capture. Trying to screen our way to safety has a ceiling. We hit it decades ago.
The better investment may not be a sharper prediction. It may be quieter, structural prevention like anti-bullying programs, supporting parents with histories of suicidal behavior, and early identification of behavioral disorders, the kind of intervention that helps a population, whether or not we ever know which child needed it most!
If you or someone else in the United States is experiencing suicidal thoughts or an emotional crisis, please call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. This is a free service, and they are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week!
I loved my family and modeling nearly destroyed me!
My doctors said I would never have children!
God is good always!
I share these photos with you to help you see that social media often shows individuals at their best. My hope is that by sharing these photos, you will recognize the struggle is real and exhausting. Please seek help sooner rather than later so you can live a fulfilling life with your loved ones! Remember...GOD IS GOOD ALWAYS! I wouldn't be here to share my story without him.
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