Parents to Parents: After Your Child's Suicide Attempt is a resource informed by interviews with parents and experts. The video was created jointly by EDC's Zero Suicide Institute and Parents to Parents, a non-profit organization that offers resources to caregivers whose child is struggling with mental health challenges or concerns. This film was made possible in part by the generous support of the Four Pines Fund.

Zero Suicide Institute recognizes that few resources exist to support parents during this challenging time. We hope your organization or healthcare system will utilize this video, promote its availability, and disseminate it widely.

You can find this resource on the Zero Suicide Toolkit at zerosuicide.edc.org/resources-parents.

Parents to Parents: After Your Child’s Suicide Attempt weaves together interviews with parents whose child made a suicide attempt and suicide prevention experts. It was created jointly by Zero Suicide Institute at Education Development Center and Parents to Parents, a non-profit filmmaker. This video describes what parents can expect in the days and weeks following a child’s suicide-related crisis; provides information on how to access effective treatment; offers insights on how parents can best support their child and family; shares information on evidence-based practices; and validates feelings that often arise. The film answers many of the questions that emerge for parents and caregivers. As the film is almost 60 minutes in length, we also offer it by chapters so that parents can return to specific content they might want to re-watch.
 
How you can promote this film:

• Health care systems should add a link to the video as part of discharge paperwork to make it readily accessible to families
• Embed distribution and use of this video as part of your Zero Suicide implementation
• Share it with your members or with your communities via linking to it from your website, listservs, sharing it in publications
• Create opportunities for parents to watch it while their child is in the hospital following an attempt
• Host a viewing at a national or local conference you sponsor – consider a panel discussion to accompany it
• Physicians, pediatricians, schools, others should readily offer it to families by talking about it, putting on their websites
• Watch this film as part of education and training for your staff or for graduate/medical students
• Community-based organizations, parent-serving organizations and faith leaders can disseminate

 
We hope that families will have this film shared with them through the infrastructure of their community (health care, schools, faith, CBOs, etc) immediately following the suicide attempt of their child. We appreciate your partnership in widely sharing this resource and hope that the families you and your members serve find it meaningful, supportive, caring, and helpful. We are deeply grateful to the parents who participated in the film and shared their very personal experiences.