Methods of treatment are different for every person. Not one method is best, or most effective, for every person. After I tell my story to people, most people ask me why I didn’t get professional help. For me, that wasn’t an option. After I was able to admit that I had a problem, I thought that I was beyond the need of help of a professional. I also didn’t want to embarrass my family by bringing it into the public. My parents never found out about the attempted suicide. They found out about the planned second one, but they never found about the first attempt. I thought that since I was extremely embarrassed by this event, that they would be embarrassed as well, and I didn’t want to put them through that. My parents never used to tell me about their problems, so I thought that that was how “grownups” dealt with their problems. Just by dealing with them on your own and not “bothering” anyone else with them. (I didn’t realize that there were people that got paid to listen to you talk about your problems.) So I created my own means of treatment. I used writing to help me through it. I wrote in my journal every day; I talked to friends about it; I talked to teachers about it. I did whatever I could without embarrassing my parents and family.

Another thing that must be stopped that I hope to use my story to do so is child abuse. It was estimated that in 2002, a total of 896,000 children were victims of some form of child abuse or neglect.2 “Child abuse is the blanket term for types of child mistreatment: physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and neglect… Young mothers, single-parent families, and parental alcohol or drug abuse are also common in reported cases. Statistics show that more than 90 percent of abusing parents have neither psychotic nor criminal personalities. Rather they tend to be lonely, unhappy, angry….”2

I was in a single parent household. My dad did drink but I would not call him an alcoholic and I would certainly not blame the emotional abuse on the alcohol because it would occur whether he was sober, drunk or just a little buzzed. The abuse didn’t get any more violent with the more alcohol he had in his system. (And to my knowledge, he didn’t do any drugs.) But he was an angry man; and the more violent insults seemed to occur when he was the most stressed out. Perhaps he was lonely at first, because of my parent’s divorce. But it was as soon as two years after the divorce that he re-married. And the abuse continued years after he was re-married. After he got re-married, the only way that the abuse was affected by the new marriage, at first, was when it took place. Now he had to do it when his new bride wasn’t around to see it. So perhaps it was just a peculiar case.