Lessons learned through the tragedy of Charlie’s suicide

As a grieving mother, I follow on social media quite a number of parents who are walking the same rocky path. Some of us are so-called “suicide survivors” and others accident and illness “survivors”, although they are not called that. No matter how you lose a child, it’s a living nightmare. It dawned on me, however, that we talk about our kids and the way they left us in very different ways.

It was today, as I was reading a post by a parent who tragically lost their child to cancer that I had this “aha moment”. In this post, the parent  referred to their child’s long, hard battle. It occurred to me that when children die from a physical disease, we mourn their loss while celebrating their fight, tenacity, grit, and spirit. But when a child dies by suicide, the response is entirely different. We  speak of their death, but not their battle. We certainly don’t praise their spirit or bravery. To the contrary, suicide is often perceived as failure, the easy way out.

Yet Charlie fought her mental health illness for five years. She was no less brave or strong than a child with cancer. It’s only just that her illness was invisible and unacknowledged or misunderstood by most. Her death was a complete shock to friends and even health professionals who had no clue how sick she was. It seems that only we, her parents and close family, really knew.

We knew because, contrary to most suicide awareness messaging, mental health has always been an open subject in our house. It wasn’t that Charlie didn’t talk to us about her struggles. Charlie was always as open as any depressed child or teen could be. Since her earlier years, I had talked to her about depression. She knew I had experienced it so I understood. There was and is no shame in it.

Charlie was so open that she once told me that she would kill herself one day. The caveat to that revelation was that when that day came, it would be the one time she wouldn’t tell me she was down. She knew I would stop her from harming herself and that would be counterproductive to her goal.

That’s why I lived for five years in a near constant state of fear. Part of me knew on some level that Charlie could die by suicide. The other part of me either didn’t believe or didn’t want to believe that could happen to us. But not a day went by that I took her life for granted. Every morning I would wake her and thank the gods that she was still breathing.

I frequently pleaded with Charlie to stay, to hold on to my belief in her when her self-belief wasn’t strong enough. I fought as hard as any parent could to get help for her. But, as one of her psychiatrists said to me after she died, “we just didn’t think that Charlie was at risk”. I will never forget hearing those words. Believe me, they didn’t make me feel better.

The words of that psychiatrist tell a part of Charlie’s story that needs to be shared: We need to do better for our kids.

I write this not to lay blame but to shine some light on Charlie’s and our experience and the truths it reveals. 1. Those like Charlie who die by suicide also fight brave battles 2. The widespread myth that only badly parented kids kill themselves ignores our reality. 3. Our mental health system, such as it is, is failing us. 4. There is a lack of adequate support and understanding in our Ontario healthcare system for the trans experience.

Charlie was apparently considered low risk because she was loved and supported as much as any child could be. I just wish I had shouted louder. It’s clear to me now that others couldn’t see past our relatively well-heeled exterior to the desperation we felt. If only the healthcare professionals had seriously considered this: Yes, Charlie was adored and affirmed in who she was but, no, she was not low risk. Charlie’s and our family’s mental health histories, and her transness, in combination, made Charlie a ticking time bomb.

As her parents, Carl and I were responsible for Charlie. But we are not mental health professionals. The health professionals in Charlie’s life - therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists,, gender specialists and others - also had a responsibility to Charlie. We all failed to save her. I don’t want other kids to be failed. I don’t want other parents to suffer like us.

I would be the first to tell you that we, as a family, received a lot of great care and living where we do gave us access to as many options as anyone in Ontario. But far too often, what was offered was simply inadequate because mental healthcare isn’t a priority.

Our healthcare system is designed to respond to acute situations and for the most part it does that well. When it comes to mental illness, however, it’s a whole different story. Mental health is treated, like any other illness, primarily with drugs. But drugs on their own don’t fix mental illness. Until OHIP provides resources for the therapeutic side of mental health care, more people like Charlie will die.

After her first brush with death, Charlie spent a week in hospital. One week. This was a teen who was determined to kill herself and our system provided one week of psychiatric inpatient treatment. When she was sent home, nothing had changed. Even her meds, which were clearly useless, were left as is because switching them would have taken weeks or even months. There are too many suicidal teens waiting in line for a room to keep any one of them in hospital for enough time to change meds and provide adequate therapy. Back when I was a teenager, three months was a typical psychiatric stay. You can’t help a suicidal person with complex mental illness in a week. It’s so inadequate as to be offensive.

As to the trans experience, in that respect we also received as good as it gets in Ontario. And, quite frankly, that is a hell of a lot better than we would have been offered in the U.S. or Great Britain. Our GP was amazing and Charlie was also a patient at the gender clinic at our local children's hospital. But, even there, mental health services weren’t available to Charlie without a six month wait, and still that wouldn’t have been enough. Mental health needs to be prioritized.

During Charlie’s brief inpatient stay, we also witnessed the lack of trans training for hospital staff, even psychiatric staff, every day. When every form has your deadname on it (for those who don’t know, Charles was her deadname), you necessarily end up being deadnamed and misgendered on a regular basis. But until we changed her legal name, which we were in the process of doing, we weren’t given a choice. Even as simple a change as to introduce a preferred name and gender section on every form would go a long way toward reducing negative experiences for transgender individuals.

While in the adolescent psychiatric unit, Charlie was also expected to walk into the common room to get her meals every day. She was petrified of this and would often choose not to eat rather than to face what she perceived as a torturous experience. Apparently, it never occurred to the staff that as a newly transitioning female, she was terrified of being misgendered or teased. This wasn’t irrational anxiety. Her fears were founded in her experience. Yet the staff didn’t have the compassion or training to support her. The more she experienced moments like this, the more misunderstood and alone in the world she felt. And this was in a place where she was supposed to be safe and get better.

Whether Charlie could have been saved can never be known but others like her can still be helped. That is why I will continue to share our story. That, and so that Charlie, my brave, beautiful girl will never be forgotten.

* To any parent whose child died by cancer or any other means: I am so very sorry that you know the pain I do. I pray for all of us, that we may find our way out of the darkness.