The Silicon Valley Suicides.
The kids wait until the passing train forces a gust you can feel on your skin. The alarms ring and the red lights flash for a few seconds more, just in case. Then the gate lifts up, signaling that it’s safe to cross. All at once life revives: a rush of bikes, skateboards, helmets, backpacks, basketball shorts, boisterous conversation. “Ew, how old is that gum?” “The quiz is next week, dipshit.” On the road, a minivan makes a left a little too fast—nothing ominous, just a mom late for pickup. The air is again still, like it usually is in spring in Palo Alto. A woodpecker does its work nearby. A bee goes in search of jasmine, stinging no one.
In many parts of town, you can hear the warning of a passing train just about everywhere: the quad at Palo Alto High School; the tables at Piazza’s grocery store, where kids from Gunn High School hang out after school; the kids’ bedrooms after midnight.
A Few students had gotten in early to take some photos dressed as Scooby-Doo characters, part of an annual volleyball-team tradition. Now one of them, Alyssa See-Tho, was waiting outside the choir room for first period to start. Slowly, classmates began to join her. Through the windows, they could spy the teachers packed in there. In the other classrooms of Henry M. Gunn High School, about 1,900 kids waited. After a few minutes the teachers filed out, each holding a sheet of paper, none talking. Alyssa took her seat inside. It was November 4, 2014, a few days after homecoming and maybe a month before college applications would start making everyone crazy. The teacher read a statement containing the words took his own life last night, and then a name, Cameron Lee. Alyssa’s first thought: Is there another Cameron Lee at our school?, because the one she knew was popular and athletic and seemingly unbothered by schoolwork, an avid practitioner of the annoying prank of turning people’s backpacks inside out.
Alex Gil got to school a little late that day and saw people crying in the hallways. The principal, Denise Herrmann, stopped him and told him, because she knew he was one of Cameron’s best friends, and he fell to his knees. He thought about a text Cameron had sent him the day before. Cameron had gone to tryouts for varsity basketball but hadn’t yet gotten his required physical, so he had asked whether Alex thought he could get in to see the doctor the next day. He must have sent the text only a few hours before he died.
In her creative-writing class later that day, Tarn Wilson asked how many people were friends with Cameron, and a third of the students raised a hand. She then asked how many had been in a class with him, and everyone’s hand went up. The kids were usually “silly and joyful,” she later said, but that period, they were “utterly and completely silent.”
That morning the school district’s superintendent, Glenn “Max” McGee, called Kim Diorio, the principal of the system’s other public high school, Palo Alto High, to warn her, “This is going to hit everyone really hard.” McGee was new to the district that year, but he’d known the history when he took the job. The 10-year suicide rate for the two high schools is between four and five times the national average. Starting in the spring of 2009 and stretching over nine months, three Gunn students, one incoming freshman, and one recent graduate had put themselves in front of an oncoming Caltrain. Another recent graduate had hung himself. While the intervening years had been quieter, they had not been comforting. School counselors remained “overwhelmed and overloaded” with an influx of kids considered high risk, says Roni Gillenson, who has helped oversee Gunn’s mental-health program since 2006. Twelve percent of Palo Alto high-school students surveyed in the 2013–14 school year reported having seriously contemplated suicide in the past 12 months.
In McGee’s third month on the job, about three weeks before Cameron’s death, a girl from a local private school had jumped off an overpass. Then, a day later, a kid who’d graduated from Gunn the year before, Quinn Gens, had killed himself on the tracks. Now it was not even Thanksgiving, and two students affiliated with Gunn were already dead.
Suicide clusters—defined as multiple deaths in close succession and proximity—feed on viral news, which feeds on social connections. McGee and the other administrators worried about vulnerable students reading too many details and overidentifying with Cameron. He had played basketball for years, so he knew people at both public high schools in town; his sister was in middle school; he seemed to have friends everywhere, and the grief was gathering momentum. Diorio had been the head of guidance at Palo Alto High (“Paly,” as it’s known in the community) in 2009 and 2010, during the last suicide cluster, but the big differences this time, she told me, were smartphones and social media. All day long, kids at Paly could get updates from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. By second period many already knew it was the Caltrain, again. That day, like every day, you could hear the train from most of the classrooms, passing every 20 minutes or so. That day, one student later told me, the warning whistle seemed like the cannon that goes off in The Hunger Games every time a kid dies.
Interview with Hanna Rosin
Thankfully, or maybe eerily, the school district was stocked with suicide-prevention experts: professionals from Stanford and amateurs who’d become deeply knowledgeable in recent years. After the 2009–10 cluster, the school district had put together a comprehensive post-suicide “toolkit” and trained the staff on what to do to help prevent another cluster from developing. Statistically, that had been unlikely. “Echo clusters,” meaning second clusters in the same location within a decade, are extremely rare. Gunn’s teachers were told they could have a substitute for the day if they felt too traumatized. Grief counselors roamed the school grounds, making themselves available to the groups of students who were standing around crying. Staff checked in with students who were thought to be especially vulnerable.
In training, they’d learned that one key to heading off copycats was not romanticizing the death, so they struggled to hit just the right tone. They had to avoid turning Cameron into a hero or a martyr without insulting his memory or his devastated family. They had to make a space for the kids to grieve without letting wreath-and-teddy-bear memorials take over the campus. In 2009, to commemorate Jean-Paul “J.P.” Blanchard, the first kid in that cluster to die on the tracks, students had spread rose petals all over the school. Tarn Wilson recalls them as beautiful and haunting but also morbid, and exactly the kind of prop that a depressed teenager might imagine as a backdrop to his own future tragedy.
The night after Cameron’s death, some classmates sneaked onto campus and chalked it up with messages like we love you cameron and rip cameron—but administrators talked with students and, after a day, had the messages erased. Eventually some students decided to hold a memorial service off campus, at a local elementary school. One of the people who planned it was Isabelle Blanchard, the junior-class president that year—and one of J.P.’s younger sisters. “I am 15 years old and I just organized a memorial,” she said to her mother, Kathleen, when she got home.
Implicit in her weary statement of fact was the underlying question: Why? How could it be that they all lived in a place that inspired jealousy from out-of-towners, where the coolest gadgets and ideas come from, where the optimism is boundless, and where, as Kathleen put it to me somewhat sardonically, “people are working on inventions that will slow aging and probably one day stop death”—and yet also a place where a junior in high school is closely familiar with the funerals of other teens?
In the nearly five years since the last cluster, many Palo Alto parents had allowed themselves to drift into a hazy and self-protective way of thinking: The kids who killed themselves must have been social outcasts or victims of clear mental illness; at the very least they must have been obviously struggling. Cameron’s death made it hard to maintain that narrative, because “he was like everyone’s kid,” says one parent whose son was a friend of his. “The prevailing feeling was: What’s the difference between this kid and my kid? Nothing. There is no safe space. My kid could be next.”
At an impromptu gathering at the Lee family’s house that afternoon, Cameron’s father read his suicide note aloud. In it, Cameron explained that his death had nothing to do with school, friends, or family. The note provided no clear reason for what he’d done, and the community was desperate for one. The only anomaly anyone could identify was that Cameron never seemed to sleep. Alex Gil told me that if you were up at 3 a.m. on a Saturday and needed someone to go to Happy Donuts with you, Cameron was your man. And throughout the week, he was typically on Twitter or Snapchat late at night. When Alex once asked why he was always up at odd hours, Cameron told him he was doing homework. That was standard around town, to humble-brag about staying up all night to study. But Alex, his friend since kindergarten, didn’t believe him. “Cam was really good with time management,” he told me. “He was a great student, all A’s. He didn’t really worry about school. It came easy to him.”
Some three months after Cameron Lee’s suicide, and about four months after that of Quinn Gens, Harry Lee, a Gunn senior unrelated to Cameron, killed himself by jumping from the roof of a building. One suicide cluster could be anomalous. In the United States, there are about five youth clusters a year. But now Palo Alto was well into its second. You’d have to be blind or stupid not to see a pattern, and Palo Alto’s parents were neither. Seventy-four percent of Gunn students have at least one parent with a graduate degree. They’d moved their families to that school district because they know how to do their research. Last year, Gunn was ranked by U.S. News & World Report as one of the nation’s top five stem schools. Every year, about 20 of its seniors get into Stanford, which is just two miles away, and a quarter are offered spots at University of California schools, which are notoriously competitive these days.
source: theatlantic
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