I am in the USA, but the site is down so I am posting on here. 11 years ago, through a series of bad decisions on my ex-wifes part, we lost custody of our then 3 year old daughter, who I will refer to as CL. Full custody was given to her great-grandparents. Since then, she has been bounced around between different family members, including my ex-wife who was told never to have unsupervised custody of her. In the past couple of years she has been in and out of troubled youth centers and behavioral health centers. About 1.5 years ago, I moved out of state to help my family. This past october, I received a phone call from her grandfather (son of custodial great-grandparent), saying if I did not take her, she would become a ward of the state and placed into the system. After 11 years of saying I wanted custody of her, I obviously said yes. 3 days later she was flown to where I live and I finally had my daughter. I knew going in that there would be an adjustment period for both of us. For the first month, I struggled with trying to get to know her and getting her acclimated to her new surroundings. The process for transferring custody has been ongoing, as her mother is MIA and they have been trying to contact her about the custody hearing. I have not been able to get her into school because I don't have the proper documentation proving custody. So she has been pretty much stuck in our small apartment with my girlfriend and her 5 year old son. I just recently started a new management job and we have been struggling to find a new place where we can all have a little more privacy. I had also set her up with a psychiatry appointment, but was holding was cancelled and I have been waiting for a time to reschedule. Backstepping to November, I found out that CL had circumvented the parental controls I had put on her phone and was using social media messengers, i.e, facebook, instagram, snapchat, to begin very inappropriate online relationships with guys. Some of the stuff I saw was horrifying. So her phone was taken away. We started to see some progress with her attitude, and her willingness to abide by the rules. At the end of december, she was given her phone back, with even more restrictions, including GPS tracking. Everything seemed fine for awhile. She started a "relationship" with a boy she met through my youngest sister. We met with him and his parents in person and we all laid down the ground rules for them. Again, everything seemed fine for awhile. We decided one night after she had hung out at his house, that we would randomly audit her phone. We found messages between her and her "boyfriend's" older cousin revealing that they had been kissing and trying to sneak off together. Our response was to call her "BFs" parents, explain the situation, and decided that she was not a good influence on their son, so the two were cutoff from each other. Obviously she was not pleased with that. She really wasn't pleased when we replaced her smartphone with a oldstyle flip phone. Her social media accounts were deleted and she has been very bored for the past couple of weeks. Tonight, while I was at work, she was texting one of her relatives back home. They messaged me and said that she was talking about hurting herself, suicide, how she doesn't want me in her life, and if she can't go back home, she would rather be in another behavioral center. It was very heartbreaking to read. Part of me knows that she is bored, and angry with me. She has a history of depression, anxiety, and self-harm. She also told my GF that she had started self harming again and showed her evidence. I called the local behavioral health center last night and was told I should bring her in but they couldn't see her until 9am the next morning. So as I'm typing this post, I have been up all night, waiting for 9am so I can take her in. I can't go to sleep for fear of her harming herself further. The most stressful part of all of this is not knowing how much of this is her just being an attention-seeking, drama-laden teenager, and how much is an actual mental health issue. I am also struggling with my own anger with her mother and great-grandparents, who let her run rampant with no discipline or rules for the past 11 years. I just would like some insight from other parents who might have an idea that I haven't thought of about how to help her and help us connect. Thanks. ... View more