She’s a parent and gets that parents and kids are sometimes or even often scared, struggling and in crisis.

She knows. She writes about the time she almost lost her daughter, thirteen at the time, to death by suicide and they spent the night in intensive care.  Her daughter was vomiting and sleeping, restlessly, all night with Douglas by her side.

“I thought back to an earlier time, when I was a brand-new mother up in the middle of the night in this very same hospital with this very same child, then a tiny newborn. I remembered how sacred and uncertain I had felt during those early hours and days of motherhood.

Those same feelings were back once again. But there weren’t any mom-and-baby classes I could take to tell me how to keep my teenager daughter safe from herself.

It didn’t matter that I was in the heart of a busy hospital, surrounded by the hustle and bustle of the ICU, and just inches away from my sleeping daughter. I felt utterly, totally alone. I felt like my daughter was slipping away.”

How do parents manage and function and cope and get help and support when our children are in agony or crisis? Douglas wrote this book, in part, so other parents would feel less alone than she had as a parent of four children who all had at least one mental health challenge. Read more.