In this week’s edition of Where Parents Talk with Lianne Castelino on 105.9 The Region, Carl, L. Hanson, a professor of public health at Brigham Young University discusses a new study that can help predict teen self-harm, suicidal ideation and behaviours, and Sara Westbrook, speaker, author and educator shares advice as an emotional resilience strategist.
Carl L. Hanson
Professor of Public Health, Brigham Young University
Co-author, Study: Algorithm can predict when an adolescent will become suicidal with 91% accuracy
Father of 4
“It came down to relationships, relationship between peers, and relationship within families that stood out to us as the most important predictors are those things which were most highly associated with suicidal thought and behaviour. So it speaks to just the power of connection. We had hundreds and hundreds of data, points, variables, features, if you will, in this dataset.
What percolated to the top fell into those two basic categories, what’s going on between peers, and what’s going on within the family. And so more more specifically, when we looked at peers, or what percolated to the top as some of those top, you know, most important predictive variables, it was between peers, whether they were threatened or harassed digitally, you know, through cell phone through social media, and also whether or not they were bullied on school grounds.”
Sara Westbrook
Emotional Resilience Strategist
Author
Speaker
Educator
Mom of 1
“So the circumstance happens, it’s not in your control, but it triggers an emotion. And that emotion can be very difficult, actually even painful. And so when we are looking at being resilient, we have to look at what makes it more difficult to bounce back and move forward. And that’s because sometimes we feel angry, and we feel sad, we feel overwhelmed or anxious and nervous, embarrassed, confused.
So providing strategies to look at, okay, emotions are natural, they’re normal, there’s actually science behind your emotions, and it’s okay to feel them. But we’ve got to learn ways to be aware of them to manage them so that we can move through and with them in a healthy way, and teach our children to do the same.”
