Emotional Intelligence | Main page on Teen Suicide

Depressed / Suicidal / Self-Harming
Teen Chat Support Group

I have been taking a break from adding new people to the chat group, but I am just about ready to get started again. What I need, though is some teens to help me as volunteers. As a volunteer you will help with things like:

- Sending out welcome email addresses to new teens.

- Maintaining the mailing list.

- Saving and editing the chats so they will not reveal anyone's identity.

- Helping make web pages showing chats and emails in the same way I have been doing for the past few years.

- Help me create a special new section of the site for teens only, which will be password protected and help me separate items which will go into this secure section vs. those which can stay on the public site.

- Helping document true stories so we can try to change the mental health laws regarding teenagers and change the way teenagers are treated in schools, homes, mental hospitals, treatement centers etc.

- Contacting human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch.

- Help develop a free online course for teens to teach useful emotional skills such as how to express their feeling and how to listen and support each other.

- Tell others about what we are doing and spread awareness of why teens really self-harm, written in the words of teens themselves, not psychologists or psychiatrists.

I also need one person who is specifically intersted in doing this when they finish high school as a full time job instead of going directly to a university. To do this work you do not need a university degree. Actually you don't even need a high school degree.

Of course everyone who is in the group will talk to everyone else. The original aim of the group was to provide emotional support, friendship and understanding so you don't feel so alone, so different, so misundertood.. We will still do this but our mission has expanded now since it has become clear that more is needed. Trust is still of the utmost importance because teens who contact us have repeatedly found that adults in the local communities cannot be trusted.

On this page there is a list of charcteristics of self-.harming teens. If you can relate to this then we can probably help you and you can probably help others.

Steve
December 19, 2007