Teen suicide risk and "learned helplessness"

Watch Video: Teen suicide risk and "learned helplessness" by David Palmiter, PhD, ABPP , ...
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Teen suicide risk and "learned helplessness"

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Few things scare away parents more than the concept of suicide. Suicide is the 3rd leading cause of among people age 10 to 24. We lose about 4600 youth a year to suicide. Research from the CDC suggest that 16% of teens each year thinks seriously about suicide. And within the past year, 8% report having attempted. It's a scary thing. I think one of the traps, we parents fall into is we determine whether a kid is suicidal based on the circumstances of their life. Good football player, attractive, good students, lots of friends can possibly be thinking that way. But we know that only about 10% of our mood is attributable to the circumstances around us. It's more how we think about our lives matters. If you did an autopsy of brain of a kid who committed suicide, 3 thoughts predominated. And these are the one's to watch for: everything sucks, it's my fault, you can't change it. If you think that way, everything sucks, it's my fault, it can't be change, suicide starts feeling like a choice because the pain is amazingly intense. That's the thinking I want to lookout for. Learned helplessness we call it. And we want to do intervention if we see that in our teenager.

Watch Video: Teen suicide risk and "learned helplessness" by David Palmiter, PhD, ABPP , ...

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David Palmiter, PhD, ABPP

Psychologist & Author

Dr. David Palmiter is a professor of Psychology and Counseling at Marywood University. He is a practicing and board-certified clinical psychologist, a past president of the Pennsylvania Psychological Association, the author of over three dozen publications, including two books on promoting resilience in youth, a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (true of < 6% of psychologists), the American Academy of Clinical Psychology and the Pennsylvania Psychological Association in youth. He has also given hundreds of workshops on family issues for organizations such as The Navy SEAL Foundation, The Master Therapist Series at the University of Connecticut, The American Psychological Association and the McGraw-Hill Financial Group and completed hundreds of media projects for outlets such as CNN, The New York Times, US News and World Report and the Wall Street Journal. David is also a dad of three (two studying at Cornell University and one still in high school) and husband of 27 years to Dr. Lia Richards-Palmiter. A central aspect of his professional mission is to put air under the wings of parents as they try to raise happy and resilient children and teens.

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