My son just started senior year, I told him that it would be an easier year for him. Only a week later, he began getting irritable and started having anxiety attacks on a daily basis.

My son argued with my husband about the fact he did not do his chores. Son claims he forgot but husband did not want to hear it. After being sent to his room for the day, Son gaslights me about how we don't understand what he's going through. But I occasionally wonder if this was gaslighting or if he's being truthful.

My son is more than three months into school and things only got worse. I have a lot to worry about and I understand that my son's going through a lot but he has no idea what I'm going through. As I tend to his dying grandmother, my son watches silently, eventually rushing to the back of the house...crying. But I told him that this was life, and left it at that. I wonder why he was so angry at me for the rest of the day, what's up with that look he kept giving me?

My son is now clearly depressed, he seems to like reaching out to friends on social media but he needs to get off those electronics. My husband went to play video games with his friends, I gotta get my son off of his games, he's played one minute too much.

My son now argues, too much actually. He says that this was to protect himself from false accusations, he tried to list all the times we "falsely" punished him but we sent him to his room for a while because we didn't want to hear it. He is being so disrespectful, so I'll place a rule against arguing in the household. My husband tries to convince me to take away his phone because of his insolence, but let's give him another chance.

My son constantly tells me about his rampant anxiety about school, grades, and assignments, he needs to stop circling. He claims that no one seems to care, but I understand what he's going through, he'll never get me. My son has been "arguing" a lot more, so I might take away his phone...

My son has been asking me left and right if he could help me with anything, I said no thanks. Tonight, husband says that my son should not get an allowance because he was not doing anything extra. My son seemed to want to say something, but Husband said that arguing was not allowed. Angrily, my son broke down and told me how he says a lot to his therapist that he does not tell us and how "it's all a matter of perspective". My husband then grounded him for the next day.  My son needs to deal with it, he needs to stop circling.

I got a call from a teacher, she said that my son literally collapsed into tears during choir today. He's circling over the negative again... He says it's because of all the stress and burnout but I think it's that phone he's always on...

I got up from a match-three game on my laptop and took away his phone. I looked through his SMS history and saw a lot of chatter going on between him and a close friend. As I put his phone in my closet, I pondered all the times he told me how he used communication to cope. I just sat back down at my laptop, my husband told me he was going out to play video games with his friends because he needed a break.

My son stayed up all night on his Kindle Fire chatting on social media with friends, so my husband disabled his WiFi as a punishment. Plus, that smart device was supposed to only be used for books.

I constantly tell my son to consider the emotional effects of what he says. Later on, I was talking with friends, my son walked in and I said how he was constantly circling over the negative. My son thundered back to his room when he heard that, he's just being too sensitive. 

My son now mostly refuses to talk to me and always gives me that look. It is clear that he harbors animosity, what did I do to upset him?

As I was watching a movie alone one night, I caught my son watching YouTube past bedtime. I took his tablet and looked at his search history...why was he looking up the nearest bridges? Possibly for something silly, teenagers these days.

He has not eaten and claims he was too sick to eat, my husband won't let him leave until he eats every crumb. Plus, this was usually a dish he liked, what happened? We stayed up for hours at the table waiting for him to eat and we gave up in the middle of the night.

He now spends entire days at the typewriter I gave him last Christmas, I told him to stop typing and to go outside for a breath of fresh air.

But when his curfew came, he didn't  come back. As a suicide helpline advert played out on the radio, I checked his room. It was a mess, pens, paper, and other creative utensils were strewn about on the desk and floor. In the typewriter, there was an unfinished letter, it reads..."Dear Mother-" 

Panicking in the face of the potentially grim scenario, I pulled out my phone and punched in 9-1-1. The police department was soon combing the area for my missing son. I was scared, I might just have a panic attack and collapse into tears. But no matter what, it felt like there was no comforting me. 

It has been several days since my son disappeared. I feel so depressed and anxious like I'm constantly sinking deeper and deeper...yet it felt like nobody cared. I investigated my son's room and discovered the stack of thought journals he constantly scribbled away in. They were filled to the brim with sketches that depicted his depression  and anxiety in a grotesque and abstract fashion. One of them depicted a cartoon effigy of my son being impaled by a spike, upon which was handwriting that was labeled "my stupid fucking brain". With each page, it felt like my son was literally silently crying out for help. Chills went up my spine when I looked at the latest entries. They had short sentences on some of the pages that state...

But the last entry was the hardest hitting...

"Every word I speak is a mistake, every step I take is an error, everything I appreciate is a cancer, everything I enjoy is an unhealthy obsession. I have no feelings, no satisfaction, no voice, no face. Is this living at all?"

There was a little doodle of himself with big Xs over his eyes and his mouth had stitches over it that forced his lips into a twisted grin. It felt like the journal itself was haunted, I slammed the book closed and rushed out of his room, it was just too much for me. But I can't escape for long, a news report came on the next day...

"This just in, a local seventeen-year-old boy by the name of ███████ ██████ who went missing for a week was found washed up on the banks of the Jumpin' Toad river. There were large cinder blocks found tied to his ankles, which suggested that they were intended to keep him underwater to drown. We'll keep you posted on further developments-"

I turned off the tv and cried for I don't know how long...

I decided to tell my son's friend the news, he's gotta know. When he answered the door, he looked at me in what appeared to be a combination of anger and total anguish. He said...

"Not all the pain is superficial. In not listening to him, you have failed him. He told me all those times you made scapegoats out of what he enjoyed, of the things that made him happy. He wrote the most wonderful things as well...he..h-he was a prodigy..."

I was thinking about telling him that my son was particularly desperate to see him in the week before he disappeared, but his friend would be outraged for I would also have to tell him that my husband and I barred our son from making the trip.

I  summoned up courage and stepped into my son's room once more and something on the wall caught my eye.

It was one of those pamphlets handed out during Suicide Prevention Week in school. Interestingly enough, the week at which we took his phone away was Suicide Prevention Week. I also discovered a Ziploc bag with all the pills he refused to take.

As I talked to my friends on social media for emotional support. I pondered one thing that my son always said to me... "It's all a matter of perspective." I realized it was not gaslighting, arguing, or him circling...It was a warning.