[REVISED] After attempting suicide, a depressed teenage girl yearns to live without fear of hurting herself but must learn to cope with the emotions that lead her to impulsive, dangerous, self-destructive decisions and actions.

Unfortunately,” learn to cope with the emotions?” is a subjective need more than an objective goal.? And it’s internal.? Film’s a visual medium.? What’s the visual look like for those emotions that lead her to self-destructive acts?

Meanwhile, the girl is in the midst of the most stressful, tumultuous period of her life — adolescence;??she has a cornucopia ?of external (visual) problems and issues she must deal with. any of which could trigger impulsive, dangerous and self-destructive decisions and actions.???Stifling parental supervision and rules,? pressures at school to make the grades and fit, identity crises,?peer?pressures to conform, the temptation of drugs and alcohol.? Beauty and body image issues. A boy friends who?is a ?bad influence.? Being dumped by a boy friend for another girl.

?And the ultimate social nightmare:?no one asks her to?the senior prom.

So many?stresses and crises?could trigger another suicide attempt.? My suggestion: pick one.

Pick one external problem or issue in the world outside her skull that she must?deal with — deal with by formulating?an objective goal that (she hopes) will resolve the problem.?? And frame a story and logline around that problem. (?With the implicit stakes being that failure to do so could trigger another suicide attempt.)

If you haven’t seen it, I highly?recommend “Ordinary People”, one of the best movies ever made about a teenager coping with suicidal urges.??Critically acclaimed, a box-office hit, it won numerous awards including the Oscar for best screenplay adaptation. (By Alvin Sargent, one of the premier screenwriters of his generation.)? The plot concerns a teenage boy driven to suicide by one specific external tragedy in his young life, the death?of the his older brother in a boating accident.

Anyway, I encourage you to keep digging.? There’s a lot of raw emotional ore to be mined?on the?topic.?

fwiw