Christine Gehrke returned home from parent-teacher conferences last spring and found blood on her bathroom floor.
Immediately, Gehrke ran to find her daughters. In a bedroom, her 17-year-old was sobbing. Next to her was her 15-year-old. She appeared to be bleeding everywhere.
“My oldest daughter had just walked into the bedroom at the very moment that the younger daughter had been self-harming,” Gehrke said. “She had probably 100 or more large, long, deep cuts in her arms and legs. And we had just found that out.”
Gehrke, a teacher in the Fox Valley, was one of the many parents to share her story through WPR's WHYsconsin about access to mental health resources in the state.