Transcription
00:08
We get a monthly visit with the folks from the McCall Behavioral Health Network. And of course, the topics are always serious, but one that I think gets a lot of attention, especially this time of year, because September is Suicide Awareness Month, and by that, Suicide Prevention Month as well. And joining us from McCall We want to welcome Laura Cummings. She’s the adolescent clinical supervisor at McCall. Good morning, Laura. Good morning. I’m happy to be here. Glad to have you on the show. We’re midway through the month, and the ad campaign we’ve been running with McCall is reminding of this very urgent call to action for us here to prevent suicide.
00:53
In your line of work, too, it’s working with adolescents. And we do that with clients who go inhouse at McCall. Tell me about what you folks do and in helping adolescents get through what can be a very challenging time. Yes, we provide clinical services for adolescents. So we have two levels of care, outpatient and intensive outpatient. Right. We more often see the suicidal ideation in the intensive outpatient because these are youth who are often stepping down from hospitalization or maybe they had some type of crisis that’s warranting this higher level of care where they come in nine hours a week. Okay, so perhaps… This is someone who’s already been under care and now they’re at McCall getting followup treatment or companion treatment for whatever they’re working through. Yes. I think a lot of us work through a lot of anxiety today. You know, we live in a culture that seems to be high anxiety and there’s a lot of stress, you know, nowadays.
01:55
And working with adolescents, you know, you can tell us about what goes on with that in trying to Get them to be able to express what they’re feeling. Yes, I think communication and support is key. So we work, you know, with the adolescents, but a huge piece of that is the family because adolescents are still embedded in their families. So I think I just want all the parents listening today to know it’s really important to make an open space to be able to talk with your child and for them to feel free to come to you. If you’re The child seems to be struggling, especially at this time of year when the kids just went back to school It’s September, we start to see anxiety ramp up, like you said, and I think checking in with them is very, very important. Make yourself a safe person for them to talk to, and part of that can be being aware of our own anxiety as parents and kind of what do we need to do to keep ourselves not amplified emotionally ourselves so we’re able to be spoken to by our children.
02:54
We have to not be afraid of bringing up the topic of suicide directly. And that’s a tough one, you know, I mean, because it’s sort of like… You don’t want to address the elephant in the room because you know somehow that could perpetuate it and somehow that could bring it on. I mean, that’s the deepest fear, right? Right, but then if we don’t talk about it directly, then our children also feel afraid to approach it, and then they’re holding that in and they’re still feeling those feelings. They just feel like they can’t talk about it safely. So, I think if we ask directly, we give them permission to speak about it, and then once it’s in the air and it’s spoken about, it’s something that we can work with because we know what we’re dealing with. Um, another more recommendation that we make, especially if you have a young person who is experiencing suicidal ideation, is making sure there aren’t anything in the home that the young person can hurt themselves with.
03:43
So it means locking up, you know, guns, knives, pills. For guns, you want to take the pieces apart so the guns can’t be used. But having them locked or even removed from the home is even better because often suicidality, it can come on impulsively. And so if we’re taking any steps we can to limit anything that the child. That’s very, very important. This is really scary stuff. You know, if you’re a parent and you’re listening, I mean, these are practical tips. Yeah. These are get your head square, and these are practical tips and tools that you can use.
04:16
Yep. Yeah. And, you know, the tragedy that we never want to hear about, and we hear about it often enough, is the parent that said, wow, I didn’t know. I didn’t have any idea, and I shoulda, coulda, woulda. Right. It’s so many extra things to kind of think about and take precautions. And be safe with. Yeah. It starts with the communication, though, doesn’t it? And having that, you know, and parents know their kids pretty well if they’re plugged in. Right. So we need to keep being plugged in. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Again, just making yourself that safe space.
04:47
If you really do feel like your child is struggling, then it’s important, too, to access mental health treatment. That’s what we’re here for and the other agencies because then there can be another safe person for your child to speak to. If you’re just joining us. This morning, Laura Cummings is the adolescent clinical supervisor for McCall Behavioral Health Network. September is Suicide Prevention Month and we’re talking about it with a focus on adolescents this morning. So we get back to, you know, talking and making sure those points are in there. And I guess a lot of that too is listening because the children will give us, they’ll give us cues that they need to talk. Yes. We had one youth come to us from the hospital who was having daily suicidal ideation. We worked with them, we got them in our program, they were attending our program nine hours a week, some family therapy to encourage communication with mom.
05:40
We also got them, you know, stabilized on the appropriate medications. We helped them make a suicide safety plan so when they started to experience suicidality, they watched a favorite movie with mom and that was kind of their activity until they could stop feeling suicidal. And then mom and the client checked in regularly, so four times a day. This was a youth who Didn’t prefer speaking verbally. They preferred to send text messages in their phone with different symbols showing whether they were feeling happy or not. And if they were if they sent the distress symbol, that meant we need we need to go watch our movie. We need to do our activity. So it was a really good way to manage. Again, the youth and the parent were checking in four times a day. They were keeping us up to date. We were seeing the youth regularly. Everyone was on the same page about what was going on and how often this young person was experiencing the suicidal ideation. And then it started to lower. And now they’re in our outpatient program they’re doing very very well so it was that’s a kind of an example of what we can do with a family wow yeah so you got to meet them where they are if they if they need to communicate electronically meet them there yes so whatever modality gets the communication going yep find it use it yeah and that’s.
06:51
Where we work with the client and the parent to see what works best what times might they want to check in you know depending on people’s school and work schedules and what works but we just it’s all tailored to them and their needs i want to get just back to um those warning signs those caution signs uh just kind of a wrap up. Because we’re talking about suicide and we’re talking about adolescents and keeping them safe so again if parents are just joining us and they’re going you know wait what um let’s just review those tools for them to just be on the lookout and to plug in communicatively yeah. So i think the tools again we would make a safety plan with them will i think if you’re feeling nervous about your child reach out and the best way to reach us is to call our main number, 8604962100 We do have offices both in Torrington and in Waterbury, so you can just say whichever office is more convenient for you where you’d like to receive services.
07:47
And we’ll schedule an intake. We can do a thorough assessment. We screen for suicidality as part of that, as well as depression, anxiety, substance use, just everything that’s going on with the young person. And then we can work with you to really make a good safety plan if there is some suicide. We’ll help the young person identify activities they can engage in until the suicidality comes down that they would do with a safe adult, maybe the parent, maybe someone else, whoever they select. We’ll work with you to figure out times to communicate and do those checkins and make sure that they aren’t feeling suicidal today. If they are, again, you implement that plan. And there are, you know, emergency resources. So if the suicidality doesn’t come down, there’s a plan. You either take your child to the hospital or one of the urgent crisis centers and you get them the help that they need because at that point it’s a.
08:32 Crisis if it’s not coming down. So that’s and then just some other pieces again removing access to lethal means is very very important which we talked about earlier and keeping communication going with your child. All right great ways to help keep our kids safe a great topic this month. Laura we appreciate your time. Thank you so much and the work you do at McCall. Thank you for having me here. Clinical adolescent supervisor or adolescent clinical supervisor at McCall Behavioral Health Network Laura Cummings our guest. Have a great day. And thanks for all the good work you folks do at McCall. Thank you. All right, we’ll get back to the newsroom with Jeff coming up, half a minute away on 973 WZBG.