Yesterday's tragedy reflects every parent's nightmare, writes Padraig O'Morain, Health and Children Correspondent
Just what happened during the night before two teenage girls were found - one of them dead - in a field in Co Donegal yesterday morning remains unclear.
The 13-year-old girl who died is believed to have been receiving help from the North Western Health Board's child-support services but people involved in these services are believed to have been optimistic about her future.
Whatever happened, the two friends failed to return home after going out together the previous night. When the brother of the girl who died went looking for her yesterday morning, he found her body and her friend unconscious beside her. They had been there for some time, gardaí said.
Tablets, reportedly morphine, were found beside them. Whether these tablets caused the death of one girl and the serious condition of the other is not known.
If they did, the girls' purpose in taking them, and whether they knew they were putting themselves at risk, is not known.
Teenagers have all sorts of reasons for taking drugs. Whether they take them for kicks or to alleviate emotional pain, the outcome is sometimes tragic.
The girl who died may have been alleviating the pain of the death of a friend this month but it is not known whether this is so.
The difficulty in understanding such events is compounded by the reluctance of adolescents to answer direct questions about their emotional state.
A counselling psychologist, Ms Asta Ghee, who is based near Tullamore, Co Offaly, and has done a considerable amount of work with emotionally troubled young people, says: "If you question them you will not get an answer."
She says it is difficult for adults, who have learned to cope with emotional highs and lows, to appreciate the intensity of emotions in young teenagers. "No adult is going to feel the same kind of feelings that an adolescent does."
Adults know that the emotional turmoil felt by the teenager will pass. Unfortunately, says Ms Ghee, young teenagers don't know this. "The feeling is so intense they can't imagine it being any other way. They can't see any light at the end of the tunnel."
She is an advocate of having personal development classes in second-level schools to teach teenagers to cope with their emotional upheavals. "What is the point in giving them academic skills if you are not giving them life skills?"
While teenagers resist questioning, worried parents can tell the teenager that they notice he or she is withdrawn or otherwise not himself or herself. Parents should never minimise adolescents' emotions by telling them they will get over it or that "there are plenty more fish in the sea".
We do not know whether these considerations are relevant to the tragedy in Co Donegal. As the parish priest, Father John Doherty, said after visiting the dead girl's family yesterday, "There's not very much you can say to a family in a situation like that. They are just completely devastated."
Unfortunately, there are many such families trying to come to terms with such tragedies. And the greatest tragedy is that some of these devastating events were brought about by emotional pain which would have passed.
