You Got Green on the Teen Signal Check. Keep Paying Attention
A social worker asked Chris Coulter if he could guarantee Teen Signal Check results. He can’t, and nobody honest can. This post explains what a green result means for parents of teens: what you noticed, on one day, didn’t raise concern. Kids move, and teen mood changes can show up later. Learn when to worry, why to keep paying attention, and how to check again as part of the Road to 100k.
I Pulled Over. My Son Finally Told Me
My son kept telling me he was fine. He wasn’t. Chris Coulter, founder of The MentorWell, shares the day he pulled the car over, and what parents can do when their teenager won’t talk to them. Practical ways to stay calm, what to say when your teen opens up, how to read the eye roll, the small habits that build trust, and when to get professional help for your teenager in Canada.
I Had Maddie for Fourteen Years
Chris Coulter lost his daughter Maddie in 2015, when she was 14. For about ten years he carried one sentence: her life was taken from him. Anger and guilt came with it. What loosened it were the stories other kids told him about Maddie, including how she stood up for a swim teammate. A father’s honest account of anger, gratitude after losing a child, and why the anger still visits.
I Used to Judge Parents Who Lost a Child to Suicide
When a parent loses a child to suicide, people quietly judge. Chris Coulter used to as well, before he became one of those parents. After more than 3,000 conversations with families of struggling teens, he has found almost no common thread in who they are: married or divorced, rich or broke, every faith and background. What the kids shared was feeling more alone than supported.
The Emotional Load Economy: The Cost Your Company Is Already Paying
Every employee brings their life to work: the struggling kid, the sick parent, the divorce. Employers already pay for that weight in lost attention, slower judgment and quiet resignations. Chris Coulter ran a 70-person company, then lived his own hardest years in silence. He explains the Emotional Load Economy and why every workplace is either adding weight to its people or taking some off.
Somebody Has to Notice First
A mental health practitioner told Chris Coulter he had no right to offer parents the Teen Signal Check because he isn't licensed. He agrees he doesn't diagnose. Here he explains how The MentorWell grew from teen mentorship into tools that help parents spot teen mental health warning signs sooner, why mentorship and therapy do different jobs, and when to get professional help for your teenager.
I Wish Maddie Could Read the Messages I Receive
Earlier this year, someone asked Chris Coulter to stop sharing photos of his daughter Maddie. Days later, a mother told him she'd let her struggling daughter scroll through them in the car, and found someone who felt like a sister. These are the messages strangers send him every week, what they reveal about who parents tell first, and why he wishes Maddie could read them.
7 Things I Got Wrong About Mental Health as a Business Owner
Chris Coulter co-owned a 70-person office furniture company from 1992 to 2010. Here are seven things he got wrong about mental health at work: calling it an excuse, doubting parents with sick kids, banning remote work, saying "let us know how we can help," ignoring the EAP, pushing through his own depression, and keeping it hidden. What to say when an employee shares a personal struggle.
She Used to Tell Me the Number
Your teenager comes home flat. You ask what happened and they say nothing. That can be the literal truth. Chris Coulter remembers when his daughter could name what upset her: a photo that only got forty-two likes. Today the pressure arrives in small pieces a teen can't explain. Here's why hunting for the incident backfires, and a better way to talk to your teenager about mental health.
Please Don't Remember My Daughter for the Way She Died
If you know Maddie Coulter because of how she died, you know the least important thing about her. She vetted my dating profiles. She ran a One Direction fan club and had 1,500 followers in a week. She was funny and loud and right more often than I was comfortable with. This is about what happens to a person's biography after they die, and a request from her father to remember the life instead.
I’m Starting to Forget Things About My Daughter. And I Hate It.
Eleven years after losing his 14-year-old daughter Maddie, Chris Coulter is confronting another painful part of grief: memories fading. From shoes at the front door to Adele in the shower, he shares the ordinary moments he refuses to let disappear and why Maddie’s life deserves to be remembered for far more than the way it ended.
I Wrote the Warning Signs for Parents. Then I Counted 11 in Myself.
Seven signs your teenager might be struggling, read back by the man who wrote them. The adult version of that list runs to fourteen items and the first seven are the same seven. Chris Coulter on cycling that quietly stopped, four hours of sleep for years, the explanation waiting for any man in his fifties who goes quiet, and why recognizing something and admitting it applies to you are two different things.
Nobody Asks How the Brothers Are
When my daughter died, her brothers were 13 and 9. Their hockey teams made black armbands with both boys' numbers on them. There was no school in that neighbourhood where they walked in as two kids nobody had heard about. This is about surviving siblings, what a grieving parent misses while they're inside their own grief, and the one thing to say to a family that has other children at home.
Everyone Goes Home After the Funeral. You Don’t.
The funeral director said he had never seen a line that long. Chris Coulter remembers comforting the people who came to comfort him. Then the next day arrived, the house went quiet, and grief moved in properly. On the hardest day after losing a child, why support thins out exactly when it starts to hurt, and why it is never too late to go back to a family in the quiet part.
I Turn 61 Today. It Took Me 15 Years to Want Another Birthday
I stopped marking my birthday for about fifteen years. Inside a five year stretch I lost a business, then a marriage, then my daughter, and somewhere in there the desire to live. What followed was about a decade of darkness I almost didn't get out of. This is what I understand now that I couldn't have understood then, including why the understanding arrives so much later than anyone tells you.
I Picked a Day
In the spring of 2018, three years after we lost Maddie, I picked a day and told nobody. Not my therapist, not my closest friends, not the people who had already carried me through the worst thing that can happen to a family. Nothing was missing from my life. I had every person I needed. What I didn't have was any willingness to be a burden to them, and that was the dangerous part.
200 People Said the School Was Wrong. Four Parents Had Signed Up.
A school cancelled a talk I was giving to parents about my daughter. The post about it reached a couple of hundred thousand people and two hundred of them told me the school was wrong. Four families had registered. I spent years angry at a coordinator because it was easier than being curious about everyone who stayed home, and what kept them home was never indifference.
I Wrote About Depression When Maddie Was 12. I Never Asked If She Was Okay.
In October 2012 I published my first post about depression. I'd been seeing a psychiatrist for four years and took a careful inventory of my own life every few weeks. My daughter Maddie was twelve. She appears in that post once, as evidence I was doing fine. Knowing about depression and seeing it in the person across the table are two different abilities, and I confused them.
Losing Maddie Also Meant Losing Myself. Nobody Warned Me About That Part.
When Chris Coulter lost his daughter Maddie in 2015, he spent the next nine years trying to get back to the man he was before. Nobody warned him about the second loss, the one that happens underneath. This is a piece about losing yourself after losing a child, about the two selves that argue in private, and about what finally stopped the arguing after eleven years.
Seventeen Hours
While my daughter was in a psychiatric unit, I felt something close to safe. There was a building with staff in it. When she came home, the fear arrived properly, and my sons were in that house for every hour of it. What the reversal does to the other children, why nobody catches it, and what helps more than a big conversation. (