The Adoption Crisis No One Wants to Name

A 19-year-old young man’s body lay mangled against the ground. His name was Luke. He was nineteen. His mother, Carolyn, arrived to find not only the unthinkable horror of her son’s final moment but also the unbearable silence that followed.

Talking about suicide is excruciating. Even the word feels heavy in the mouth. It’s a word people lower their voices to say. Talking about suicide within adoption is even harder. It forces us to look directly at the fault lines beneath a system so often wrapped in the language of love and rescue. Critiquing adoption already makes people uncomfortable; add suicide to the conversation, and many fall silent. Yet the reality is, adoptees who seek therapy are four times more likely to attempt suicide than non-adopted people. But Luke’s mother, Carolyn, refuses to stay quiet. In her backyard, she grieves inside a small “she-shed” her husband built for her as a refuge where she can cry, meditate, write, and hold their dog to ease the ache of losing Luke. Above her chair hangs a piece of elementary-school art he once made. In The Luke Project: What My Son’s Life and Death is Teaching Me, Carolyn threads her way through memory and pain, uncovering how adoption’s silent wounds shaped the contours of her son’s life.

I first met Carolyn and Dirk in Denver, when they picked me up from the airport. I was giving a keynote on race and adoption at the annual African Caribbean Heritage Camp, where adoptive families gather each summer to learn, play, and face the truths that adoption often hides. This is one of the rare places adoptive parents can go to get post-adoption support.

Motivated by faith and a quiet sense of duty shaped by their Dutch heritage, they had been missionaries in the Dominican Republic when they decided to act on the Haitian political unrest, the poverty, the orphanages filled with children. When they began the adoption process their social worker asked them bluntly, “Are you trying to save these Black children?” They said no. They believed, as so many do, that a loving home would always be better than an orphanage. But now, Carolyn’s understanding has changed. “We were destructively naïve,” she told me. “We didn’t see that bringing a child out of one world and into another would traumatize him.”

She remembers those early days vividly. “It was February, and we tried to put a coat on Luke, but he refused. He hadn’t ever needed to wear something like that before. On his birthday, we had a cake, but he didn’t want it. We brought out little blow toys, and he freaked out. He was terrified of motorized toy cars.” Carolyn had thought she understood cultural differences from her time spent living abroad in Belize, Nigeria, the Philippines, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic. “I thought that made me globally aware,” she said. “But, now, it’s so obviously different to travel when you’re the one choosing to enter another culture, rather than being permanently plucked from your own. For Luke, it wasn’t an adventure—it was pure loss.”

At nine months old, Luke weighed just ten pounds—his body hovering at the edge of starvation. After a long hospital stay, he spent a year in a Haitian orphanage before being adopted at the age of two. Trauma trailed him like a shadow. The challenges that followed were relentless: disordered eating, explosive anger, self-sabotage, resistance to attachment. Carolyn came to understand these behaviors only years later, through her professional work at a foster care organization.  “I learned that the first year of life is extremely important to brain development. It’s the time when kids figure out how to do relationships—how to trust,” she told me. “During Luke’s first year in the orphanage, he had multiple caregivers. It was comfortable for him to get his needs met by a plethora of different people. Then we brought him to America and our nuclear family system. How confusing and unsettling that must’ve been.”

This realization, she said, changed everything. “Luke would refer to his friends’ moms as ‘Mama.’ It broke my heart and boiled my blood.” After his death, she came to recognize this pattern not as defiance but longing. She realized that he sought belonging wherever he could find it—sexual relations, gaining special treatment from his teachers, charming his way out of homework assignments. Carolyn reflects now on how limited her understanding of race once was and how her good intentions were shaped by a shallow grasp of her own white privilege. “As I stated in my eulogy, Luke’s decision to take his life was probably the one thing he had ever had complete control of…There was precious little peace to be had in a life like his. He faced a plethora of challenges within and without.”

She and Dirk tried everything they could think of: therapists, mentorship programs with Black men, even asking Luke if he wanted to be enrolled in a middle school for boys of color. But Luke resisted it all. “He told me that he didn’t identify with that culture,” Carolyn said. “He couldn’t embrace his Blackness or his adoptee identity. It just didn’t feel like him.” When they tried connecting their children with a Haitian community group, the kids came home uneasy, saying, “Those kids were mean to us.” It was then, Carolyn told me, that she began to understand how belonging isn’t built through exposure alone—it requires safety, reflection, and mirrors that truly see you.

As she spoke, I found myself thinking about the time I sat at Jada Pinkett Smith’s Red Table Talk trying to explain what it means to be a Black transracial adoptee and to be deracinated from Black culture. Despite my best efforts, Jada and Gammy misunderstood, hearing my story as a rejection of my Blackness rather than a reflection of the fact that I had never had the chance to develop it. It almost felt like they were embarrassed on my behalf. That they despised the thought that I, too, would be seen as a Black person in the same way they were. Perhaps this was what a middle-school-aged Luke meant when he told his parents that “the Haitian kids were mean to us.” For me, being chastised by one of my own felt especially damning. I think of Luke and how his proximity to whiteness—the classrooms, the friendships, the white girls who adored him—must have been both comforting and confusing. Were they drawn to him, or to the idea of him? Did it matter, if at least it made him feel wanted?

Carolyn now sees Luke’s behaviors—though often exhausting and bewildering to parent—not as personal flaws but as predictable echoes of trauma, loss, and racial displacement. A child’s desperate search for safety in a world that had taken it from him too soon.

It’s unlikely that Luke’s birth mother knows he died by suicide. Carolyn met her only once, when Luke was two—malnourished, fragile, and on the brink of death. After his passing, Carolyn gathered the courage to contact Gladys, the director of the orphanage that had once cared for Luke, hoping she might help locate his birth mother and share the news. Instead, Gladys’ response stopped her cold: “That’s the fourth child adopted by Americans that we’ve lost. The Foundation for the Children of Haiti, where Luke once lived, no longer facilitates adoptions. “Now they try to keep the kids in the country,” Carolyn beamed. “This is really great because the ideal world is for a child to stay in their culture, ideally in their birth family, with all the support they need.”

In the end of Carolyn’s book, her bluntest line is also her truest: “Luke’s childhood was abducted.” It’s a sentence that carries both confession and indictment. When I asked Carolyn what might have helped her in raising Luke, she didn’t hesitate: “More support. More training before adoption—and hand-holding after. Something more like what foster families get.”

I asked if suicide among adoptees was ever discussed in her community—or at Heritage Camp. She shook her head. “No. Who wants to talk about that at that point?” Then, after a moment: “But now I wish it had been offered. Even if I hadn’t gone, at least it would’ve been in my awareness as a possibility.”

Why Adoptee Mentorship Matters

“More support. More training before adoption—and handholding after,” Carolyn told me. She’s right: adoptive families do need more preparation and follow-up care. But for many adoptees, those interventions can feel pathologizing—another way of treating their pain as a problem to be fixed rather than an experience to be understood. What’s missing isn’t more monitoring, its connection. This is why I founded the Adoptee Mentoring Society.

When I asked Carolyn whether adoptee-to-adoptee mentorship might have helped Luke, she paused. “He’d probably have said no,” she admitted. “‘I don’t want a mentor. I don’t think about adoption, and I don’t care about Blackness. That’s not me.’” She and her husband had taken him back to Haiti. They offered to help him search for his birth parents. He wasn’t interested. “But I do wish he had simply known those spaces existed” she added. “Even if he’d never gone.”

That longing—for connection, for awareness—is at the heart of what I’ve spent years trying to understand. Therapy, while essential, often isolates an adoptee’s pain as individual pathology rather than locating it within the ruptures of adoption itself. What’s needed is long-term scaffolding: community, racial literacy, and opportunities for adoptees to see themselves reflected.

Every October 30th, social media fills with candlelight for Adoptee Remembrance Day, a vigil born of necessity. Yet just days later, November ushers in National Adoption Awareness Month—awash with celebratory slogans that rarely make space for grief. The truth is that adoptee mental health is a public health crisis hiding in plain sight.

Mentorship, when it works, occupies a vital middle ground—neither therapy nor casual friendship. It’s the simple but radical act of one adoptee saying to another: You are not alone. Your feelings make sense. Your response is normal to an abnormal situation.

“Much like I wish the word suicide could’ve been uttered in our adoption camp circles,” Carolyn said quietly, “I wish Luke could’ve just known mentorship was a possibility—even if he never took us up on it.”

A Call to Action

Even though people die by suicide every day the difference here is in the pattern. The statistic about adoptees being four times more likely to attempt suicide than non-adopted people isn’t an anomaly; it’s a public health crisis hiding in plain sight—one we ignore precisely because adoption is so often celebrated as redemptive. The narrative of “love is enough” continues to dominate while the evidence of pain piles up. Luke’s story isn’t tragic because he struggled—it’s tragic because those struggles were predictable, preventable, and shared by too many adopted people who never receive the lifelong support they need. We have built an adoption system that ends at the finalization of the adoption, with little thought for the decades that follow.

Families need preparation that is trauma-informed and racially literate. Adoptees need community, therapists and mentorship by adoptees. Policymakers and funders must invest in programs that center adoptee voices, not relegate them to the margins, or worse, label them “angry adoptees.”

Carolyn’s decision to tell the truth about her son’s life and death is a kind of generosity. It breaks the silence that has long stayed within the realm of adoptees speaking to each other. Her longing and love for motherhood did not erase Luke’s inner turmoil, borne of the rewiring of his brain in his earliest days and years. Her words carry both grief and warning: “It always felt to me like he was never able to fully step into and enjoy the multitude of gifts and abilities he was blessed with. He was always haunted by feelings of unworthiness, of not being enough.”

Adoption doesn’t erase loss. Love doesn’t cancel trauma. But honesty, preparation, and community just might save lives.