Why Are Palo Alto’s Kids Killing Themselves?

http://www.modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/why-are-palo-altos-kids-killing-themselves?src=longreads

Suicide clusters—defined as a group of three or more suicides in close time or geographic proximity—are exceedingly rare: There are an average of five per year in the United States. Most common among adolescents, college students, prisoners, and soldiers, clusters have occurred in locales both like and unlike educated, wealthy Palo Alto. Recently, there have been clusters at high schools in Fairfax County, Virginia; at the University of Pennsylvania; and at MIT. On the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, nine young people have killed themselves since last December…

I followed news of the heartbreaking 2009–10 Gunn High cluster with a sense of suffocating unease. I wanted to write about the impact of the kids’ deaths on the town—and to ask what made Palo Alto different from other elite, affluent campus towns around the nation—but I was consistently shut out by the people closest to the events. The Palo Alto school district and community, terrified that media coverage—or even public utterance of the word “suicide”—would spread the contagion, implemented an unofficial gag order. The fear was too great—nobody would talk…

This was particularly true of the teens, who volunteered acute insights about their town, their school, and the contradictions of a culture that demands personal excellence but withholds emotional support…

On Monday morning, the victim’s identity was released—Harry Lee, age 17—and the terror of the weekend was replaced by a devastating resignation. In a ritual that started after Cam’s death, dozens of Gunn students replaced their Facebook avatars with a message that read “We’re All in This Together” in white lettering on a red background…

At a packed memorial service at Spangler Mortuary in Los Altos, Harry’s mother related that a few weeks prior, Harry had been deeply depressed, had even mentioned wanting to die. He was getting help, she said, but there were waits for referrals and appointments. In the end, it was too late. This, tragically, is not an uncommon set of circumstances: In Palo Alto, as in many other cities, wait times to see a mental health professional are increasing as rates of depression soar…

Indeed, Palo Alto’s avoidance of the word “suicide” is “very much exemplary of how we deal with problems here,” says Anna Barbier. “It’s like the chalk. No one addressed it. They just washed it down.” She’s referring to a series of chalk memorials that were drawn by students all over the Gunn campus after Cam’s death. Rather than leaving them up as a reminder of (or, school officials feared, an homage to) suicide’s lasting effects, the administration unceremoniously hosed them away within hours. The students were left feeling wronged, their voices and feelings silenced. In April, their fury at being ignored boiled over again in the form of a Tumblr blog called My Voice Matters, where nearly 200 students posted portraits of themselves with their hands blocking their mouth…