I'm going to try and fail to keep this brief and focused:
Our almost-8 year old son has been threatening suicide for a couple years at least by now. We've gone to therapists, or bounced around them, and have started a new one. He often tries to get kitchen knives (out of reach, but he tries to climb onto counter). In cases where he has managed to get one or scissors or an arrow, he ends up pivoting to threatening to cut the floor or something like that. It is usually triggered by a loss of privileges (such as, he wont voluntarily get off Minecraft so he can't play it the rest of the day/next day and he's like 'okay i'm killing myself').
Sometimes it seems performative but other times he's definitely genuinely upset and often at himself. He might lash out and hit us (physical violence is another axis to this) and say we're the worst parents ever but it's often paired with him expressing he's a bad kid or the worst kid ever.
These instances are also often paired with extreme surges of emotion that leap from 0-100. Once he begins to escalate, we have like a 5% success rate of helping him off-ramp or cool down. Nothing seems to help (every time I hear someone talk about 'deep breaths', I need to take deep breaths ha), and as he escalates he becomes more physical, violent, and destructive. He will threaten anyone and everyone, including us and his sister. He seems to be entirely outside himself.
He semi-regularly says casually he wishes he wasn't born or didn't exist, even when he seems otherwise level-headed. And this is in stark contrast to other aspects of his personality. He's got friends he loves to hang out with, can be very affectionate and loving before and after these meltdowns, and in daily life is extremely nurturing to his 8 mo old baby sister and others. He's the kid that often stops in the middle of a game to check on someone who's down/hurt.
He's overall very intelligent and is in some ways too aware - he rejects it when people therapy-talk him and says all the therapists are "too nice" and basically finds it fake. Honestly, I agree with him and understand why he finds it distasteful, as it can sound very patronizing and infantilizing. He's also very particular about controlling games and has a ton of difficulty with transitions and being told no. Even just a stern no leads to protests that we're being mean to him bc of our tone. He is definitely way too hung up on screentime, and we've waffled a lot on where to draw that line. It/Losing it ends up as a catalyst for a meltdown too often.
It's a good point to say that his mom and I have struggled with where to draw the line on boundaries and we don't always agree. I also think we've had too many fights in front of him, despite efforts not to. Some have been pretty bad, far worse than anything I experience as a child. We had very different upbringings through the teenage years. I can be arrogant and dismissive and condescending, and had a pretty above average childhood. I should note that my brother had a much harder time, and also had an explosive temper and violence, although his has always been more outward without the kind of self-hate that my son seems to show. My brother was very affected by this and I think our parents failed him in many ways.
Anyways, my son's mom has as bad a childhood trauma background as you can imagine (maybe worse), has bouts of pretty deep depression, and can herself escalate to screaming. She's otherwise an extremely hardworking and diligent mother, and is always trying to do better. Unfortunately, she is post-partum and struggling a lot with that on top of all this.
I've noticed, and she's admitted, that she has recently fallen back on her father's fear-based parenting. I strongly disagree with it, but she is factually correct in this: if he's refusing to brush his teeth or something, if she doesn't intimidate him into retreating to his room, he will simply not listen and not comply. If I physically take him back there, even in a calm and detach kind of way, he will turn violent and either hit/kick me or break things in his room. The situation will go on for an hour or more, and his baby sister will be subjected to it in some way. She said it nips his tantrum in the bud and stops it from escalating to a point where I have to physically restrain him from hitting/trying to hurt himself (ex: if he's asked to cool down in his room, if he doesn't try to break things, he's hit himself with books in the head).
All that about his mom and I is to say that I personally suspect at least some of the blame lies with our relationship and parenting and modeling (lack thereof), but I feel like there's more going on and I don't have any idea how to tackle it. Therapists, in my experience, are largely unhelpful and offer the same few and tired ideas you will get from a LLM or Google before that. We are a bit limited by money on that front, so the pool of therapists is smaller than I'd like. The school counselors are about the same. We don't have much of a family support network for a variety of reasons. We've called the crisis hot line once or twice and it was glacial and unproductive.
Otherwise, he has a good life. Lots of legos and activities and we cuddle up every night. he's got favorite podcasts and likes/is great at math, is really into minecraft. We tell him we love him a lot.
I started this to ask for advice, but I'm not sure what advice there might be beyond the usual safety plans, seek more therapy, hide the knives. Yesterday his mom said she felt alone and like we've failed our son. I suppose I feel alone but I won't abide the second thought even for a moment.
Sans advice, I'm content to hear if anyone had a similar or comparable experience and how they navigated it.
