Ep #21 - Suzanne Alderson

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Suzanne Alderson is a mental health expert, author and community builder who founded the charity Parenting Mental Health following the attempted suicide of her daughter Issy.

Whilst her work is dedicated to helping parents with mental health her story and book will resonate with anyone who has been a child, been a parent, wants to be a parent, wants good mental health or a society with mental healthy children. This is exactly the sort of conversation we created the podcast for: moving, informative and a lot fun.

The story of how Suzanne turned her pain and need into an online community for parents of children and teenagers suffering from acute mental illness is stunning. Today she supports over 20,000 parents through its Facebook group, in-person events and online mentoring and training programme!

Buy Her Book

'Never Let Go' is a great book. James and I loved it and, as we discussed on the podcast, it is not rude to give it a Christmas present.

Three Key Takeaways:

1. It can be so difficult for parents to accept that their child is struggling with mental health challenges, but we have to accept what’s happening to help change it.

2. We shouldn’t view mental health struggles as “bad behavior” on the part of our children - these are real illnesses which need to be taken seriously.

3. Suzanne realized she needed to move “from parenting to partnership,” stepping away from the traditional parenting role so that she could listen to her daughter and what she needed - we explore what this means in the podcast!

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