The silent car ride,
The tearful eyes
The day I finally died inside.

The blood soaked wrist
And the glistening knife
Were the things that
Should have ended my life.

They rushed me off
To the hospital that night
A place for people
Who lived in fright

The horrific white walls
The tensions cold air
The children crying out
In their pain and wear

The dark room
My roommate and I kept
Was the one that haunted me
Every night when I slept.

The blood that was drawn
I still painfully lack
It haunts me these days
To ever look back.

Ten therapy sessions
Each day and night
So overwhelming
I wanted to fight.

The bolted windows
The locked doors
The imprisoned children
In the psychiatric ward

Letters from loved ones
Saying I love you so much
Them saying they need me
And miss me and such

I open the closet
In the bedroom
So plain
The door filled with
Carvings and drawings
And names

A phrase carved into
That old wooden door
It read Kelly died here
And I could not ignore

To this day I wonder
If that Kelly is alright
If she has fun with friends
Or has sleepless nights

I remember that day
With the glistening knife
The blood soaked wrist
And the horrible life

I still walk on
With my head held high
As I think of the
Day I died inside.
Read More Here

Did i do that by ~m1rna on deviantART

For Children Who Were Broken
it is very hard to mend……

Our pain was rarely spoken
and we hid the truth from friends.

Our parents said they loved us,
but they didn’t act that way.
They broke our hearts
and stole our worth,
with the things that they would say.

We wanted them to love us.
We didn’t know what we did
to make them yell at us
and hit us,
and wish we weren’t their kid.

They’d beat us up and scream at us
and blame us for their lives.
Then they’d hold us close inside their arms
and tell us confusing lies
of how they really loved us –
even though we were BAD,
and how it was OUR fault they hit us,
OUR fault that they were mad.

When days were just beginning
we sometimes prayed for them to end,
and when the pain kept coming,
we learned to just pretend
that we were good
and so were they
and this was just
on of those days …
tomorrow we’d be friends.

We had to believe it so.
We had nowhere else to go.

Each day that we pretended,
we replaced reality
with lies, or dreams,
or angry schemes,
in search of dignity ….
until our lies
got bigger than the truth,
and we had no one real to be

Our bodies were forsaken.
With no safe place to hide,
we learned to stop
hearing and feeling what they did to our outsides.

We tried to make them love us,
till we hated ourselves instead,
and couldn’t see a way out,
and wished that they were dead.
We scared ourselves by thinking that,
and scared ourselves to know,
that we were acting just like them –
and might ever more be so.

To be half the size of a grown-up
and trapped inside their pain….
To every day lose everything
with no savior or refrain…
To wonder how it is possible
that God could so forget
the worthy child you knew you were,
when you had not been damaged yet …
To figure on your fingers
that the years till you’d be grown
enough to leave the torment
and survive away from home,
were more than you could count to,
or more than you could bear,
was the reality we lived in
and we knew it wasn’t fair.

We who grew up broken
are somewhat out of time,
struggling to mend our childhood,
when our peers are in their prime.
Where others find love
and contentment,
we still often have to strive
to remember we are worthy,
and heroes just to be alive.

Some of us are healing.
some are stealing.
Most are passing the anger on.
Some give their lives away to drugs,
or the promise of like beyond.
Some still hide from society.
Some struggle to belong.
But all of us are wishing
the past would not hold on
so long.

There’s a lot of digging down to do
to find the child within,
to love away the ugly pain
and feel innocence again.
There is forgiveness
worthy of angel’s wings
for remembering those at all,
who abused our sacred childhood
and programmed us to fall.
To seek to understand them,
and how their pain became our own,
is to risk the ground we stand on
to climb the mountain home.

The journey is not so lonely
as in the past it s been …
More of us are strong enough
to let the growth begin.
But while we’re trekking
up the mountain
we need everything we’ve got,
to face the adults we have become,
and all that we are not.

So when you see us weary
from the day’s internal climb …
When we find fault
with your best efforts,
or treat imperfection
as purposeful crime …
When you see our quick defenses,
our efforts to control,
our readiness to form a plan
of unrealistic goals …
When we run into a conflict
and fight to the bitter end,
remember …
We think that winning means
we won’t be hurt again.

When we abandon OUR thoughts
and feelings,
to be what we believe YOU
want us to,
or look at trouble we re having,
and want to blame it all on you…
When life calls for new beginnings,
and we fear they re doomed to end,
remember…
Wounded trust is like a wounded knee–
It is very hard to bend.

Please remember this
when we are out of sorts.
Tell us the truth, and be our friend.
For children who were broken…
it is very hard to mend.

More Poetry http://survive.org.uk/poems.htm

Subject: Worth The Read

This is heavy, but well worth the read. Especially for anyone with kids…….

First I’M going to tell you a little about me and my family. My name is Jeff. I am a Police Officer for a city which is known nationwide for its crime rate. We have a lot of gangs and drugs. At one point we were # 2 in the nation in homicides per capita. I also have a police K-9 named Thor . He was certified in drugs and general duty. He retired at 3 years old because he was shot in the line of duty. He lives with us now and I still train with him because he likes it. I always liked the fact that there was no way to bring drugs into my house. Thor wouldn’t allow it. He would tell on you. The reason I say this is so you understand that I know about drugs. I have taught in schools about drugs. My wife asks all our kids at least once a week if they used any drugs. Makes them promise they wont.

My wife Kathy is a nurse and we have 3 children. Kyle was the oldest at 14. The other two are 12 and 13 years of age. Kyle loved football and played for his school. I went to every one of his games. He didn’t always play much since it was his first year but I didn’t care. He also loved playing games on his computer or his playstation. When World of Warcraft was coming out in a beta version he signed up like 200 times to be a beta tester for it. If you were picked you got a number and could go to the site and download it. Well, Kyle signed up so many times he received 2 numbers. He then posted one on ebay and sold it for 375.00 dollars. Unbelievable for a 2 or 3 month beta test. He then contacted a losing bidder from California (different time zone) and sold him the 12 hours that he would be sleeping or in school for, for 100.00 dollars. They shared the log in code. Kyle had so much potential. He could do anything he wanted to.

I like building computers occasionally and started building a new one in February 2005. I also was working on some of my older computers. They were full of dust so on one of my trips to the computer store I bought a 3 pack of DUST OFF. Dust Off is a can of compressed air to blow dust off a computer. A few weeks later when I went to use them they were all used. I talked to my kids and my 2 sons both said they had used them on their computer and messing around with them. I yelled at them for wasting the 10 dollars I paid for them. On February 28 I went back to the computer store. They didn’t have the 3 pack which I had bought on sale so I bought a single jumbo can of Dust Off. I went home and set it down beside my computer.

On March 1st I left for work at 10 PM. At 11 PM my wife went down and kissed Kyle goodnight. At 530 am the next morning Kathy went downstairs to wake Kyle up for school, before she left for work. He was sitting up in bed with his legs crossed and his head leaning over. She called to him a few times to get up. He didn’t move. He would sometimes tease her like this and pretend he fell back asleep. He was never easy to get up. She went in and shook his arm. He fell over. He was pale white and had the straw from the Dust Off can coming out of his mouth. He had the new can of Dust Off in his hands. Kyle was dead.

I am a police officer and I had never heard of this. My wife is a nurse and she had never heard of this. We later found out from the coroner, after the autopsy, that only the propellant from the can of Dust off was in his system. No other drugs. Kyle had died between midnight and 1 Am.

I found out that using Dust Off is being done mostly by kids ages 9 through 15. They even have a name for it. It’s called dusting. A take off from the Dust Off name. It gives them a slight high for about 10 seconds. It makes them dizzy. A boy who lives down the street from us showed Kyle how to do this about a month before. Kyle showed his best friend. Told him it was cool and it couldn’t hurt you. Its just compressed air. It cant hurt you. His best friend said no.

Kyle’s death
Kyle was wrong. It’s not just compresses air. It also contains a propellant. I think its R2. Its a refrigerant like what is used in your refrigerator. It is a heavy gas. Heavier than air. When you inhale it, it fills your lungs and keeps the good air, with oxygen, out. That’s why you feel dizzy, buzzed. It decreases the oxygen to your brain, to your heart. Kyle was right. It cant hurt you. IT KILLS YOU. The horrible part about this is there is no warning. There is no level that kills you. It’s not cumulative or an overdose; it can just go randomly, terribly wrong. Roll the dice and if your number comes up you die. ITS NOT AN OVERDOSE. Its Russian roulette. You don’t die later. Or not feel good and say I’ve had too much. You usually die as your breathing it in. If not you die within 2 seconds of finishing “the hit.” That’s why the straw was still in Kyle’s mouth when he died. Why his eye’s were still open.

The experts want to call this huffing. The kids don’t believe its huffing. As adults we tend to lump many things together. But it doesn’t fit here. And that’s why its more accepted. There is no chemical reaction. no strong odor. It doesn’t follow the huffing signals. Kyle complained a few days before he died of his tongue hurting. It probably did. The propellant causes frostbite. If I had only known.

Its easy to say hay, its my life and I’ll do what I want. But it isn’t. Others are always effected. This has forever changed our family’s life. I have a hole in my heart and soul that can never be fixed. The pain is so immense I cant describe it. There’s nowhere to run from it. I cry all the time and I don’t ever cry. I do what I’m supposed to do but I don’t really care. My kids are messed up. One wont talk about it. The other will only sleep in our room at night. And my wife, I cant even describe how bad she is taking this. I thought we were safe because of Thor. I thought we were safe because we knew about drugs and talked to our kids about them.

After Kyle died another story came out. A Probation Officer went to the school system next to ours to speak with a student. While there he found a student using Dust Off in the bathroom. This student told him about another student who also had some in his locker. This is a rather affluent school system. They will tell you they don’t have a drug problem there. They don’t even have a dare or plus program there. So rather than tell everyone about this “new” way of getting high they found, they hid it. The probation officer told the media after Kyle’s death and they, the school, then admitted to it. I know that if they would have told the media and I had heard, it wouldn’t have been in my house. We need to get this out of our homes and school computer labs.

Using Dust Off isn’t new and some “professionals” do know about. It just isn’t talked about much, except by the kids. They know about it.

April 2nd was 1 month since Kyle died. April 5th would have been his 15th birthday. And every weekday I catch myself sitting on the living room couch at 2:30 in the afternoon and waiting to see him get off the bus. I know Kyle is in heaven but I cant help but wonder If I died and went to Hell.

Jeff

Article From teendrugabuse.us

Easy access to chemicals makes huffing a popular alternative for teens. Inhalants effect the biological and neurobiological involvement by abusing brain receptors in the neurotransmitter system. These areas of the brain change by an action of the different chemicals, which are facilitated by inhaling or breathing in enough molecular levels to change the biological influences, which leads to intoxication.

There are one thousand common household products that can be used for intoxicating proposes. These volatile chemicals such as Toluene and other fumes, can be inhaled and offer a rush that lasts for forty five minutes or more. These products are legal, inexpensive, and easy to get. Studies have shown that it is easy to walk into any hardware store and walk out with a can of paint thinner, or any other chemical that can be used to get high by huffing.

The following are some known substances that are categorized as being abused by inhalation:
•    Hydrocarbons
•    Nitrites
•    Anesthetics
•    Alcohol
•    Halogen compounds
•    Airplane glue
•    Scotch-guard
•    Pam cooking sprays
•    Carbon tetrachloride - used in swimming pools
•    Gasoline
•    Paint thinner
•    Butane
•    White out or correction fluid
•    Colored markers

There are other items too numerous to list, because there are over fourteen hundred known substances that are categorized as a capable substance that can be abused by huffing.

Teen Drug Abuse Intervention
Help fight teen drug abuse, we provide information to help fight teen drug abuse by prevention and intervention.
http://www.teendrugabuse.us

Suicide is the third leading cause teens, but teenagers and their parents underestimate the risk or think that it doesn’t happen in their own communities, a new study shows.

Researchers conducted focus groups with parents and teens living in urban, suburban, or rural areas in an effort to better understand their attitudes and perceptions regarding adolescent suicide.
They found that parents and teenagers were able to identify many of the most common risk factors for suicide, including depression, alcohol and drug abuse, and relationship problems.

But both groups also tended to underestimate the risk in their own backyards, believing instead that it was a problem in other communities, says study researcher Kimberly A. Schwartz, MD, of UMass Memorial Children’s Medical Center in Worcester, Mass.

“The thinking was that it might happen over there, but it doesn’t happen to us,” she tells WebMD.

Identifying at-Risk Teens

Read Full Story Here

In 2006, 1,771 children and teens between the ages of 10 and 19 committed suicide in the U.S. Teenage boys were four times as likely as teenage girls to die by suicide and they were also more likely to use guns and suffocation to kill themselves. Girls were more likely than boys to use pills.

Among ethnic groups, teenage suicide rates were highest for Native Americans and Alaska Natives, with 15.4 deaths per 100,000 teens. Rates among white, Hispanic, and African-American teens were 4.7, 3.0, and 2.7 per 100,000, respectively.

Schwartz says many of the parents who participated in the focus groups expressed frustration about distinguishing between true warning signs of suicide and normal teen angst.

They recognized that guns and potentially lethal medications should be secured or removed from the homes of teens who are at risk for suicide, but acknowledged that they may have difficulty identifying those teens.

“There seemed to be a disconnect about the importance of securing guns and medications regardless of risk,” Schwartz says.

Both parents and teens wanted more information about how to identify and help at-risk teens.

The study appears in the February issue of Pediatrics.

If you want to learn when someone is at risk of committing suicide and what to do, schools and pediatricians should be able to help, but we can all become better educated through reliable resources on the Web. These authoritative sites list typical signs of suicide risk, and they also provide questions a parent or a friend can ask a teenager to find out if he is considering killing himself. Here are good places to start:

• The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry lists signs and symptoms of suicidal thinking, such as saying things like “I won’t be a problem for you much longer.”
• The American Academy of Pediatrics urges parents to ask the child directly about suicide. “Getting the word out in the open may help your teenager think someone has heard his cries for help.”
• The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline provides free advice to someone considering suicide, as well as to friends and relatives, at 800-273-TALK.
• The National Alliance on Mental Illness’s teenage suicide page makes the point that talking with someone about suicide will not “give them the idea.” “Bringing up the question of suicide and discussing it without showing shock or disapproval is one of the most helpful things you can do,” the NAMI site says. “This openness shows that you are taking the individual seriously and responding to the severity of his or her distress.”

Tips from theantidrug.com

Chase Bank is giving away one million dollars. TWLOHA is a finalist. We’ve had to create a proposal around a need, a plan and an outcome. We’re partnering with Kristin Brooks Hope Center - the founders of 1-800-SUICIDE - which has answered more than three million crisis calls over the last decade. We’re working with KBHC to launch IMAlive, a live online crisis network. All of the details are listed at the link below. In short, we believe we have the opportunity to bring hope and help to thousands with this. We believe we can lower the suicide rate in America and around the world by meeting people where they are - online.

It’s easy, fast and free to vote

For you tweeters

Vote anytime between now and Friday (1/22).

Found a great article on psychologytoday.com:

Middle school years have never been easy ones for kids, but girls today are having a particularly tough time. The suicide rate for girls ages 10 to 14 increased a whopping 76 percent in 2004, according to the latest numbers available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For those between 15 and 18, the rate went up more than 30 percent.

Alan Berman, a psychologist and director of the American Association of Suicidology in Washington D.C., says although the increase is worrisome, it could be just a random fluctuation. But child and adolescent psychologists report that the prevalence of self-harming behaviors—like cutting and burning—is also rising.

Steve Hinshaw, a clinical and developmental psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, believes a combination of cultural and parental pressures is to blame. His book, The Triple Bind: Saving Our Teenage Girls from Today’s Pressures, argues that girls today are subjected to unrealistic pressures from society and the media, and their once-private identity struggles are now public, thanks to the Internet. Girls are still socialized to be nurturing caregivers but are now pressured to excel academically and athletically as much as boys—all while remaining thin, sexy, and beautiful.

Female role models, Hinshaw says, are “ultra-sexy, ultra-feminized women, like the female surgeons on Grey’s Anatomy or swimsuit-modeling tennis players” like Ana Ivanovic. Long gone are the days when girls revered women like Dorothy Hamill, Joan Baez, or Gloria Steinem. Now every preteen aspires to be Gabriella Montez, the lead female character in Disney’s High School Musical franchise, who is not only sexy but a Broadway-caliber dancer and singer and a soon-to-be freshman at Stanford.

Girls feeling pressure to achieve often go frenetically from one activity to the next, leaving little time to develop coping skills, laments Alec Miller, chief of child and adolescent psychology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. “They don’t have unstructured time to just hang out with friends,” he says. “Yet this is when kids learn how to tolerate frustration, regulate emotions, and solve problems.”

They also lack the privacy needed to work through the emotional struggles of adolescence because of cell phones, instant messaging, and social networking sites. “Let’s say things aren’t going well in middle or high school and you email someone about it,” Hinshaw says. “Soon it’s all over everyone else’s email, text messages, MySpace, Facebook. Everyone knows what’s going on in your life and they’re all talking about it. You can’t escape it.” —Eilene Zimmerman
Parental Control - What can parents do about the increasing pressures on young girls? Miller advises cutting down extracurricular activities and turning off the computer and cell phone so kids have time just being with themselves: “They should not be continuously connected, because they need time with their own thoughts.” Hinshaw says the answer may be in getting middle-schoolers to think about something other than themselves, like ecology, politics, or community service: “They need a connection to something deeper than themselves, their friends, and their appearance.”

I have heard a lot of discussion lately about these Pro-Anorexia websites lately.  A lot of people believe they should be illegal because they are a danger to the people who frequent them.  Aonorexia is one of those topics that, while serious, you don’t often see being discussed on tech news sites. But like everything else, instructional information about how to maintain an anorexic lifestyle has made its way onto the Internet. Pro-ana has become so popular online that entire communities have formed around such sites, with users sharing tips, providing emotional support, and encouraging each other on their impossible quests for “perfect” bodies.

Some politicians in France believe that those who run pro-anorexia websites should face fines and jail time for promoting an unhealthy lifestyle of excessive thinness. But trying to crack down on these sites not only appears impossible, but counterproductive.

From wikipedia:

Pro-ana refers to the promotion of anorexia nervosa as a lifestyle choice rather than an eating disorder. It is often referred to simply as “ana” and is sometimes affectionately personified by anorexics as a girl named Ana. The lesser-used term pro-mia refers likewise to bulimia nervosa and is sometimes used interchangeably with pro-ana.  Pro-ana organizations differ widely in their stances. Most claim that they exist mainly as a non-judgmental environment for anorexics a place to turn to discuss their illness, and support those who choose to enter recovery. Others deny anorexia nervosa is a mental illness and claim instead that it is a “lifestyle choice” that should be respected by doctors and family.

A Chicago-area psychotherapist who works with adolescents who have eating disorders;  confirms that eating disorders can be increased by putting girls who suffer from them into group settings with fellow sufferers. “Girls that struggle with anorexia are extremely competitive with each other,” she says, “so groups in general have been contraindicated for their treatment. It spikes the behavior when they get around each other, they start trying to outdo each other in degrees of skinniness.”

While banning these websites might seem to be an appropriate response the issue of Freedom of Speech automatically comes into play.  There is a point, though where someone needs to step in and protect the kids that are going on this site and finding strength in numbers to promote their negative and dangerous eating disorders.

Pro-ana websites present exactly this sort of scenario. “Having the websites offline would diminish access to a worldview that is deemed by scientists and psychologists to be incredibly unhealthy, one that can compromise [girls'] health in a very strong way and shorten their lifespans significantly,” says DeVries.

But controlling such sites runs into freedom of speech issues in most democracies; and as the RCP notes, “making them illegal would lead to criminalizing a vulnerable group of young people,” since most sites are set up by people who have an eating disorder themselves.

Instead, the RCP recommends that pro-ana and pro-mia sites become a part of the government’s action plan for Child Internet Safety, which encourages industry self-regulation and education for parents and teachers.

Read Article Here

A more effective approach to dealing with pro-ana sites might not be censorship, but education and support services, providing more positive health information, both online and off, for young people struggling with body image issues.

Many cities and states are rapidly banning the act of texting while driving. If you are guilty of the occasional text while you drive, this article concerns you. Although we do not advocate drinking and driving, a text while driving does not have a consumption scale to use as a guide to decide if you drive, and one text message is all it takes to impact a driver’s focus. Many adults and teens hold entire conversations via text while they drive. The potential for something bad to happen as a result of this action is real. While there are many dangers associated with any driving distraction, text messaging has become very popular, and people of all ages are guilty of trying to text while driving. If you ask and they are not too embarrassed to admit to a situation, most people who have ever done so have a near accident experience they can share as a result of texting while driving.

Please do not allow yourselves to be distracted while driving, and please don’t text and drive. It’s not just the teens who hit the text button. Many adults text while driving for both personal and business reasons. Texting includes reading and responding to e-mail if you have a phone that can do so. Some companies have made it against company policy to text and drive while working or when driving a company vehicle. Since text bans are not yet nationwide, many companies are updating policies because they recognize the dangers associated with this issue, not to mention potential liabilities.

Even at a slow speed of 35 mph, a sudden impact to another vehicle, object or individual can be deadly. Parents who text while they have their children in the car are setting a poor example and need to change this behavior immediately. How important can a message be when you are driving? If you are meeting a friend, plan ahead and do not rely on texting to find a parking spot near one another. Agree to meet in an area of the parking lot and talk face to face to decide where to park. Better yet, agree to park as far out in the mall parking lot as possible and walk in together. You can talk about so many more details of a subject than what you would have been able to say in a text or two.

The costs of texting and driving can be very high. Some cities have fines upward of $650.00 if you are ticketed for this offense. It can also be expected that if you are at fault in an accident, your insurance rates will go up. If you have a fender bender, the insurance deductible to repair your car will also be out of your wallet. You could also face losses that are too terrible to fathom. The cost of a life is not worth the cost of one of the allowances from your text message bundle.

Text messaging is a good thing. Text messaging while driving is not. Please don’t text and drive.

Tabitha  Read More

When I was in high school I used to steal whiskey from my parents gallon jugs of Kentucky Gentlemen. I’d fill up a jar, put the lid on and drink it on the way to the bus stop and in the bathrooms in between classes. I did this for my whole 10th grade year. My parents were clueless. I also used to sneak out the window at midnight and stay out until 4 or 5 in the morning so I could hang out with my boyfriend who I wasn’t allowed to see (my parents found out we were having sex and told me to pretend he was on a 6 month deployment (Navy dad)) I took speed most of my junior and senior year in high school (I loved it because I lost weight), smoked pot and tried cocaine. Every time I’d get caught doing something I’d be put on restriction for a month and then I’d go right back to what I was doing before. I wonder if my mom and dad every tried to stop and figure out why I needed to be trashed in order to feel good about myself. I was a miserable teen. I hung out with the popular kids but I was so shy that I had to get high in order to have fun, talk - I couldn’t do hardly anything without getting a buzz first. Looking back I think it was obvious how miserable I was but there were 6 kids in my family so it was probably overlooked. I think these days there is a lot more material for parents, to help them help their kids. I am going to try my hardest to keep up with everything my kids are doing so I can help them through the rough spots and maybe they won’t feel the need to get high or practice unsafe behaviors. Here are a list of some of the risky teen trends today.

Pharmaceutical products

Usage of prescription medicines as a means to getting high is the fastest growing form of drug use in the USA, Mr. Krieger explained. Unfortunately the so called “pharming parties” have become popular among American youth. In these parties, participants bring with them whatever pills they can find in the medicine cabinets of their homes. Kids will place the pills in a big bowl and each person ingests an assortment of the pill mix and waits for the unknown effect to set in. Inadvertently parents and grandparents have become “a great source of drugs” with often serious consequences. Mr. Krieger urges parents to discard all unused and unneeded medicine and keep those medicines that they have to use in a secure place out of reach of their adolescent children.

The other common medicine cabinet item that is abused is cough syrup such as Robitussin DM. DM stands for Dextromethorphan which is an opioid agent used as a cough suppressant. Other cold medicines that can produce the effect of a high are those that contain the narcotic codeine or hydrocodone. In large quantities, these substances can cause hallucinations, seizures and neurological damage.

Sometimes teens mix Robitussin and alcohol. A half a bottle of Robitussin and a bottle of beer can produce the same effect as drinking an entire six pack, Mr. Krieger said.

Inhalants

According to the 1996 report by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, one in five American teens have used inhalants to get high. Inhalant abuse starts often in grade school. Most households have a large variety of potential sniffing material, such as solvents (paint thinners, gasoline, glue, correction fluid and markers) and gases (butane lighters, propane tanks, spray paints, whipping cream aerosols, deodorants etc.)

Sniffing can cause brain, liver, heart and kidney damage. More seriously inhalant abuse can cause a “Sudden Sniffing Death” (SSD.)

Mr. Krieger provided examples of common inhalant using methods, such as painting sleeves with markers and holding the sleeve near the face. Parents should pay attention to chemical odors on clothing and paint marks on faces.

Stimulants

Another growing trend among adolescents and college students is the consumption of energy drinks such as Red Bull or Rockstar. These drinks contain high dosages of caffeine as well as multiple other chemicals and botanical extracts that can cause a toxic cocktail especially if consumed in high quantities or with other caffeine and alcoholic drinks.

There are even energy drinks that are packaged to attract younger children. Some energy drinks are also advertised with open references to other more serious stimulants such as cocaine or ecstasy.

Mr. Krieger said that he is concerned with young people consuming large quantities of these drinks. The other reason for his concern is that energy drinks are often used before sporting events. High dosages of caffeine have been linked to abnormal heart rhythms and nausea.

According to a 2003 John Hopkins University study, the average daily intake of caffeine is 280 milligrams among the general population. Daily usage as low as 100 can lead to physical dependence, Mr. Krieger said.

One of the most dangerous stimulants, heroin, can be obtained easily. According to Mr. Krieger, New Jersey is the leading state in the United States for heroin availability. The purity rate of heroin sold today ranges from 40 to 95% while in the 50’s and 60’s the purity rate was approximately 5%.

Red flag behavior

Mr. Krieger explained that a male brain does not reach full maturity until a person reaches his late 20’s, while the female brain matures a couple of years earlier. Therefore, substances used at a young age such as alcohol and drugs affect the brain while it is still developing. The ‘not yet mature’ brain may also reduce the full understanding of risky behavior and its consequences.

Besides drugs and alcohol there are numerous other ways adolescents make bad decisions.

One example of risky behavior among teens is “the choking game” in which kids are seeking to alter their consciousness by choking themselves, thus cutting off the oxygen flow to the brain. This high is achieved by releasing the choke hold just before passing out.

Mr. Krieger said that many hanging deaths among youths have been classified as suicides although they may have been a result of the choking game. Other behaviors that should alert parents are cutting and various types of “body art.” Parents should also monitor their children’s Internet use as well as the content of the video games.

Although teen years are a step to more independence, adolescents need their parents’ presence to guide them to make the right choices, Mr. Krieger said. He urged parents to engage their children in social interaction and conversation as well as to keep vigilant for any signs of risky behavior.