Suicide around the teen years is so sad because it shows just how difficult life can be in that time, and how little support is being given to so many thousands

Suicide around the teen years is so sad because it shows just how difficult life can be in that time, and how little support is being given to so many thousands of teens. Being a teenager in the U.S. means you're: 1. Going through puberty still and have all the crazy emotional states that go along with that. 2. Possibly having sex for the first time, and hopefully you're making the right decisions in that area. 3. Finishing up the required and free part of your education. This means you have to make decisions that will drastically alter the rest of your entire life, such as whether will you go to school, where you'll go, how much debt are you willing to take on, and what you'll study. If you make the wrong decisions here, you could suffer financially for decades to come. There's much more but it's really a crazy time in life, and I've seen so many parents who treat their teenagers like they're simply overly-dramatic children who can't possibly understand how hard "real life" is. Meanwhile those same parents in part only experienced difficult adult lives due to the fact they made poor decisions in their teenage years. To me, it all comes down to parenting. It comes down to making sure your children have strong support systems. I lost a close friend, a 19 year old, a couple of years back to suicide. An outsider would have assumed his parents were extremely supportive, but they were unfortunately too focused on his material success vs. his emotional and social success.