How to Help a Suicidal Teen: 5 Reasons Kids Don’t Tell Their Parents They’re Struggling

When a teenager is experiencing suicidal thoughts, a parent may assume their child will come to them for help. After all, parents are often the people children have relied on throughout their lives when they were frightened, hurt, or overwhelmed.

But suicidal thoughts can be very different.

This article summarizes a conversation from the Giving Voice to Depression podcast, hosted by Terry McGuire, with suicide prevention expert Dr. Stacey Freedenthal. A psychotherapist, author, consultant, and academic, Freedenthal brings both professional expertise and personal lived experience with suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts to her work.

She is the author of Helping the Suicidal Person: Tips and Techniques for Professionals and the article “10 Reasons Teens Avoid Telling Parents about Suicidal Thoughts.”

In the podcast conversation, Freedenthal explains why teenagers sometimes conceal suicidal thoughts from the people who love them most—and how parents can respond in ways that make future honesty more likely.

Important: The discussion applies to teenagers experiencing suicidal thoughts who are not in immediate danger of acting on them. If a teenager is in immediate or extreme danger, emergency intervention is necessary.

1. Listen Before Trying to Reassure Them

A parent's instinct is often to make the pain disappear.

When a teenager says they are thinking about suicide, a frightened parent may immediately respond with reassurance:

• “You have so much to live for.”
• “You're so young.”
• “Things aren't as bad as they seem.”
• “This will pass.”

Those statements may come from love. But to someone experiencing intense emotional pain, they can sound like dismissal.

Dr. Freedenthal emphasized the importance of keeping the door open for more communication:

We want to respond in a way that encourages more disclosure, not discourages it.

A teenager has often spent considerable time deciding whether it is safe to disclose suicidal thoughts. If the first response they receive minimizes what they are experiencing, they may conclude that the parent does not understand.

The result can be silence.

The goal in that first conversation does not have to be convincing the teenager that everything will be okay. It is understanding what their world feels like right now.

Listening might mean asking what has been happening, how long they have felt this way, what the thoughts are like, and what makes the pain feel unbearable.

Parents do not need to immediately solve the problem. Sometimes the first and most important message is simply:

I want to understand. Keep talking.

2. Don’t Make Teens Manage Your Fear

Learning that your child has thought about suicide can be terrifying.

Fear, grief, disbelief, and panic are understandable reactions. Freedenthal is careful not to demonize parents who react emotionally to something so frightening.

The problem arises when the parent's emotional reaction becomes so overwhelming that the teenager suddenly feels responsible for comforting the parent.

As Dr. Freedenthal explained:

So many times a parent gets very upset and then the focus turns on the parents and they're upset rather than on the teen and what their needs are.

A teenager may quickly retreat. They might say they did not really mean it, apologize for upsetting their parent, or insist everything is fine even when the suicidal thoughts remain.

Freedenthal described how that interaction can affect what the teenager decides to share in the future:

They really may still be thinking of it and now they've learned, I can't tell my parents because it will burden them.

This dynamic is especially concerning because people experiencing suicidal thoughts may already believe they are burdens.

Depression and suicidal thinking can distort a person's perception so severely that they begin believing their loved ones would be better off without them. As Terry noted during the episode, believing that you're a burden to the people who love you can be one of depression's most convincing lies.

Freedenthal emphasized that most parents would far rather live with the worry that accompanies helping their child than experience the profound grief of losing them.

But trying to guilt a teenager with that reality is unlikely to help.

Instead, parents can work to communicate steadiness: You are not too much for me. I want to know what is happening. You do not have to protect me from your pain.

3. Direct Anger Toward the Situation Instead

Some teenagers conceal suicidal thoughts because they fear anger, punishment, judgment, or rejection.

Freedenthal has heard painful accounts of young people who disclosed suicidal thoughts only to be insulted, struck, called selfish, called “crazy,” or told never to talk about suicide again.

For someone already overwhelmed by hopelessness, those reactions can reinforce shame and make another disclosure far less likely.

Dr. Freedenthal offered parents an important reframing:

The anger belongs to the situation, not to the person.

Suicidal thoughts are not an attack on a parent. They are something happening to the teenager.

Freedenthal elaborated on this distinction:

Suicidal thoughts are themselves something that happens to their teen. It's not something that anybody chooses.

Suicidal thinking may arise from depression or another mental illness, but Freedenthal explains that it can also be associated with stress, sleep deprivation, and other circumstances.

Whatever the cause, a person generally does not wake up one morning and casually decide to start thinking about suicide.

Recognizing that distinction can change a family's posture from conflict to collaboration.

Instead of:

Why are you doing this to us?

the mindset becomes:

Something painful is happening to you. How can we face it together?

That shift allows parents and teenagers to become allies against the factors driving suicidal thoughts rather than adversaries fighting each other.

4. Avoid Using Guilt to Prevent Suicide

Another response Freedenthal cautions against is taking a teenager's suicidal thoughts personally.

A parent might respond by asking how their child could possibly consider doing something that would cause the family so much pain. Or they may tell their teenager that if they really loved them, they would never think about suicide.

The intention may be to remind the teenager how deeply loved they are. But guilt can create additional emotional weight for someone who is already struggling.

Dr. Freedenthal explained why guilting someone can backfire:

The problem with guilting somebody is that, again, it may shut them down.

Instead, Freedenthal points to the importance of ambivalence.

There is often a conflict within a suicidal person: part of them desperately wants their suffering to end while another part still wants to live. Helping someone connect with that surviving part can be more powerful than imposing reasons they should want to live.

As Dr. Freedenthal explained:

We can help people get in touch with their own ambivalence about their suicidal thoughts and what their reasons are, what is stopping them from acting on their suicidal thoughts.

Those reasons do not always have to involve an inspiring vision of the future.

Sometimes there may only be curiosity about what happens tomorrow. Sometimes the connection is to one person, an animal, a goal, a place, or an unfinished experience.

Reflecting on something another suicide attempt survivor had previously shared on the podcast, Terry put it this way:

You don't have to be excited about a future, just at least a little curious about it.

That seemingly small curiosity can represent something tremendously important: a part of the person that still wants to remain alive.

5. Recognize How Suicidal Thinking Distorts Reality

Perhaps one of the most important things parents can understand is that suicidal thinking often does not operate according to ordinary logic.

From the outside, death may obviously appear to create infinitely more suffering than whatever problem a teenager is facing.

From inside a suicidal state, however, the situation can look completely different.

Freedenthal discussed author David Foster Wallace's comparison between suicide and escaping a burning building. A person jumping from a burning building is not necessarily choosing the fall because they desire it. They are trying to escape something that, in that moment, feels even more unbearable.

Dr. Freedenthal summarized the underlying idea:

The suicidal person doesn't choose death. They're choosing less suffering.

She is careful with even the word choosing, because severe emotional distress can profoundly affect a person's perception and judgment.

As Dr. Freedenthal clarified:

I want to be careful about using the word choosing because often that choice is made under duress, under the influence of very distorted thinking.

This distinction matters because viewing suicide solely as a rational, deliberate choice can lead parents to blame their child for thoughts that the teenager may already desperately wish they did not have.

Freedenthal understands that experience personally as well as professionally.

Speaking candidly about her own history, Dr. Freedenthal shared:

I definitely have lived experience with suicidal thoughts and with suicide attempts.

She explained that there had been a period during adolescence when she romanticized suicide and her thoughts were more benign. But when severe suicidality struck in her twenties, the experience was profoundly different.

It did not feel like something she had chosen.

It felt like an assault.

Describing how unbearable that period became, Dr. Freedenthal recalled:

I would compare it to every morning waking up and being, I don't mean this metaphorically, I mean literally being tortured.

Her lived experience helps illustrate why suicidal thoughts can become so convincing. A person who believes unbearable suffering will continue indefinitely may begin perceiving death as the only available escape.

That perspective may seem irrational from outside the suicidal state. Inside it, however, distorted thinking can make an irrational conclusion feel frighteningly logical.

Dr. Freedenthal described what her personal experience has helped her understand:

I think I speak from a place that's informed not only by my professional training but also by my lived experience of having been there that helps me to understand how the irrational can seem rational.

Understanding this does not mean accepting suicide as inevitable. Quite the opposite.

It means recognizing that simply arguing with someone's reasoning may not reach the suffering underneath it.

The more useful question becomes:

What is making life feel this unbearable, and what could reduce that suffering enough for another possibility to become visible?

Helping Teens Feel Safe Telling Parents

Parents understandably want the perfect words when their teenager is struggling.

There may not be perfect words.

Throughout the conversation, Terry, Bridget, and Dr. Freedenthal repeatedly return to something much more basic: listen.

Near the end of the episode, Terry underscored that point:

And listen: listen, listen, listen, so you actually understand what's going on.

Listen long enough to understand before reassuring. Listen without making a child responsible for managing a parent's fear. Listen without anger, guilt, judgment, or immediately challenging whether their feelings make sense.

Most importantly, remember that disclosure itself can be an act of tremendous vulnerability.

If a teenager tells someone they are thinking about suicide, that conversation provides an opportunity to reinforce an essential message:

You can tell me the truth about how much you're hurting, and I will stay here with you while we figure out what comes next.

That does not mean parents must handle suicidal thoughts alone. Professional support may be necessary, and immediate danger requires emergency intervention.

But a parent's response in those first vulnerable moments can influence whether the teenager continues talking or returns to silence.

And when someone is struggling with suicidal thoughts, keeping that line of communication open can matter enormously.