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Here we go, I'm just full of questions for you guys tonight. xd Before I go into the real issue here, I'll go into a bit of a background for you guys first.

My sister has changed a great deal in the last year. She used to be fun-loving, caring of others, considerate and compassionate - she'd give you the shirt off her back if you asked. Well, granted that she was wearing another shirt underneath, so as to not show her bra... anyways. Last year, on November 8th, my sweet dwarf rabbit Muffy passed away unexpectedly. He was suddenly sick that morning when I woke up, and despite the vets trying to save him, he died literally within 12 hours. I think this is what triggered everything in my sister's life suddenly turning upside down. My sister has this thing about always having to be the center of attention. When Muffy passed away, everyone was focused on me, and I think this was the trigger for her.

Two days after he died, my sister told my parents that she was suicidal. They called her therapist (depression runs in my family) right away, and she was brought to a psych ward at a nearby hospital for 2 weeks. She said that she had been cutting herself, but she had no scars anywhere on her body, leading us to believe this was just a cry for attention. At first when we brought her in, she just kept saying she was "depressed" and "suicidal" and wouldn't give more information than that. We could only see her for an hour each day she was in the psych ward, and the therapists didn't really know what to do as she didn't show any signs of disorders (other than depression), so their solution was to put her on a heavy dose of Prozac and release her after 2 weeks.

My sister was home for a week then, and everything was entirely different. She was never like this before, but we thought that from talking to the other kids in the psych ward, she got ideas of how to act, what to say, to manipulate us into giving her attention even further. Suddenly she claimed to see people walking around that weren't real, telling her to kill herself. She said she kept seeing everything covered in blood, rooms filling up with blood... that sort of thing. We had to remove everything from the house we could... cords, ropes, nails, screws, knives, razors, any tools, shoelaces... it was awful. On one hand we all felt bad for her, but on the other hand we didn't really believe her. It was really hard to...

She went back to the psych ward after that week, where we told the therapists about the new things she was claiming to see and hear. In her private meetings with the therapists, she told them she'd never said such a thing. They released her after several days, saying she showed no signs of being depressed or a danger to herself anymore, though they prescribed a sleep medication and an antipsychotic for her. They did say from her behavior though, that she has borderline personality disorder. They agreed that she really probably didn't need to come to the psych ward again, and that she had been lying as a way to get even more attention from all of us.

Fast forward to August of this year. We were getting ready to leave for our block party, which my mother and father had been planning for weeks... so suddenly, all the attention was off my sister and I guess she couldn't handle it anymore. Suddenly, she broke down and said that our neighbor had been raping and molesting her for the last ten years... Needless to say, this pretty much shattered everything in my family. We talked to police and detectives for months, and while the guy does has an extensive drug record, it really didn't add up. My sister had a physical exam by a detective, and then she changed around the story, making everything else she had said not credible. The other girls my sister claimed had been raped, I am friends with, and all of them basically laughed in our faces in disbelief when we asked them about it, making my sister all the more impossible to believe... the supposed molestor has a younger sister that my sister is friends with, so while it is possible something happened when she spent the night at their house, you would think that after one incident she would avoid going over there entirely altogether, not magically redeciding to go back over after each incident over a ten-year period...

Now, this leads up to my current issue with my sister, which is as follows.

My sister's best friend is this kid named Ian, who graduated high school earlier this year. My sister just turned 16 in August. I suspected for a long time that Ian and my sister were fooling around - I always got this creepy nagging feeling whenever I was around him, and the more I heard about him the worse I felt. My suspicions have, sadly, turned out to be true... but it gets more than that. Apparently, Ian is a pretty big man-whore. I couldn't even guess at how many people he's slept with, but I know that he sleeps with both males and females - basically, anybody that's available. When my sister was hospitalized last year, she became infatuated with Ian because he was her only friend that didn't blow her off for being a psycho (also why the doctors labeled her as a borderline personality disorder, from the infatuation). My sister is very trusting of me, and through our sporadic and random conversations about him, I have learned the following:
- He usually has 5 or 6 girlfriends at any given time, not including whatever one-night-stands he manages to find.
- He has STDs. Not only genital warts, but I think chlamydia and gonorrhea (spelling?) as well.
- My sister has to beg him to use a condom whenever they have had sex.
- Not only have they had sex in her bedroom, but they had sex in our living room when the rest of the family wasn't home, in both of our showers, in my parents bed, in a random field at our cabin, and at my grandparents's house when they were gone and we were watching their dog, in their bed.

If this isn't the only issue, now I have also discovered this last week that my sister has a blog on Xanga, as well as a profile on Myspace, where she is, in all literal terms of the word, a cam whore. Needless to say I was disgusted and shocked to see all the comments of random older men on her page (remember she is 16), as well as pictures of their penises they have posted... what's worse, is there are names listed throughout of the (perhaps?) dozens of guys she has had sex with... my god, and she's only 16...

I think the last straw for me was a party I went to a few days ago for Halloween, with my boyfriend and his friends. My boyfriend went in the other room to get a drink and these random guys I didn't know started talking about a chick on Myspace. It didn't take me long to realize that they were talking about my sister, as they were laughing over her pictures and the posts that she's made on her. The worst part is not only were these guys all over 18, but some were in their mid-20s and the oldest was, I believe, 28...

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Obviously, I have decided the only way I can help my sister in this situation is to talk to my parents about everything that's going on. My issue is, I'm not sure of exactly how to go about doing that. My parents are extremely religious, and while I feel they need to know, it won't take much for my sister to figure out I was the one that informed them of her activities - besides for the fact that she already has all this information published on the internet...

I'm hoping that by talking to my parents they will severely limit her freedoms in order to protect her. I realize that I will probably never have her trust again, but if this is what it takes to keep her dead from AIDs, getting an STD, or god forbid ending up pregnant, this is what I feel I must do.

I know this sort of situation doesn't happen to just anyone out there, but if you guys have any suggestions for me at all about how to go about this without completely destroying my family... any suggestions would be great... neutral

I don't think her trust is all that important at the moment. Her saftey is definatly president.

I have a feeling all of this behavior goes right back to her cries for attention that just take another form. She will probably be extremely happy on the inside once your parents know and start throwing the attention her way again. Of course she is going to rebel on the outside but that just brings in more attention right?

She could probably use some more time with a therapist. Not necessary in the hospitalvut just having someone to talk to. This behavior is as self destructive as anything else she has done. You parents will probably have to strip back her privilages to what she would have had as a small child and start parenting all over again.

I don't envy your situation. One of my friends is in the same place. I will invite her to the guild to have a look at this and see if there is anything she can suggest. Her sister started doing crystal meth maybe a year ago. She was 14 at the time. I don't know all the details but I know that some police men found her sister passed out drunk on a public trail one night. Apperently she had been with a guy earlier so it's not hard to use your imagination.

It's so hard to understand why two kids under the same conditions can go in totally different directions but do your best to support her mental and physical health even if she isn't happy about it.

Well, I think she has some sort of disorder, though I don't know the name. Its not normal to crave attention that badly. As for telling your parents, I'd say just do it straightforward, when you get a chance to talk to them alone.