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WILL’S CHOICE
A Suicidal Teen, a Desperate Mother,
and a Chronicle of Recovery
By Gail Griffith
New York: Harper-Collins publishers: 2005
Available May 2005
Reviewed by Lon Woodbury
lon@woodbury.com
Will’s Choice is one of the stories behind the headlines,
and the drama behind those sterile statistics of attempted
teen suicides. This is a memoir of a mother who faced one
of the things parents fear the most in their teenage child
– an attempted suicide stemming from chronic depression.
Throughout the book, the author shares her frustration with
the search for adequate options to help her son, many of which
proved inadequate. She explains the frustration of caring
for her depressed son, and finding him unconscious one morning
from an overdose of prescription medications. She expresses
the confusing and conflicting professional suggestions, and
coping with hospitalization.
With sheer luck, she stumbles across Susan Dranitzke, an
educational consultant who steers her in the direction of
several good therapeutic boarding schools and treatment centers.
The final choice is Montana Academy, a well-regarded therapeutic/
emotional growth boarding school near Kalispell, MT. In the
Montana wilderness, her son learns to handle his demons and
rebuild his life, along with “rethreading a loom of tangled
relationships between children and parents—and between children
and the wider world.”
This book can be valuable for any parent of a teen. Through
one mother’s experience, it provides a roadmap of what a family
can go through when the bottom drops out of their child’s
life. She experiences the despair of watching her son self-destruct,
the frustration of overly busy professionals providing rote
solutions that are not adequate. She shares the hope that
gradually builds when a proper intervention is found through
a residential placement run by people who are “honest, decent
and caring, and put their best efforts” into working with
her son.
She explains all the false starts that do not work. She analyzes
the routine suggestions by professionals that turn out to
be un-suitable. Furthermore, she describes the fears that
the solution she finds will not accept her and the chilling
fears at those times when her son challenges the treatment
and structure so necessary for his future well-being. In addition,
she shares the simple but important things, like finally being
able to sleep deeply once she makes the decision and her son
is finally in a safe place with caring people.
At root, this is a book of hope. Hope that no matter how
bleak the situation appears, there are solutions in the form
of good quality residential programs for self-destructive
young people, when parents research to find them. Contained
in this book is a message to desperate parents of self-destructive
children that there is no problem without a solution.
About the Author:
Gail Griffith is a graduate of Georgetown University;
she currently works on the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation’s
International Campaign to ban landmines. Gail is a promoter,
fundraiser and organizer actively involved with international
humanitarian and art causes. She lives in Washington D.C.
Copyright © 2005, Woodbury
Reports, Inc. (This article may be reproduced without prior
approval if the copyright notice and proper publication and
author attribution accompanies the copy.)
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