Community Reviews

Overall Community Rating:
(1 review)
09/17/2007

Unfortunately, the only way one is going to find out if a teenager is at risk for suicide is to ask intrusive questions and get honest answers. If a TeenScreen program does this because it's trying to save lives, and someone makes a mistake -- which is what this report was about -- what happens is parents get upset and protest. Counselors should be more careful not to take a kid aside and ask them if they are at risk just based on a computer test. They have to combine that test with behavioral observations and be intelligent about it. Mistakes often take a TeenScreen program out of commission. I think one family's self-absorbed protest doesn't work when you're trying to find the hidden truths that lead teenagers to kill themselves, but we are a self-interested society. So add that to adult multimedia-social illiteracy and you just get another obstacle to stopping a suicide before it happens. I think we as a society have to be prepared for the teen suicide rate to go up another 200% before we'll really do anything about it.

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