
Why Are Palo Alto's Kids Killing Themselves? - austenallred
http://www.modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/why-are-palo-altos-kids-killing-themselves
======
gargarplex
Here, hazarding a guess:

Palo Alto's real estate prices are among the highest in the nation. To afford
that kind of real estate you have got to be a pretty big achiever; you've got
to be book smart, emotionally smart, and capable. Unfortunately these traits
are not 100% heritable. Yet the expectation is placed on the children to
achieve at a level comparable to their parents. Living in an environment with
identity-level expectations that are impossible to satisfy is miserable.

~~~
jtzhou
Yep. If you slip up -- a series of B's, a summer wasted at a dead-end job, or
a break-up with a significant other you sunk tons of time into, and end in a
lower-tier area, you'll be effectively "banished" from the community. Your
"friends" will look down at you at the 10-year reunion you likely won't
attend, and you'll never be able to afford to live in the area you grew up.

Banishment, or the threat of it, is one of the most psychologically difficult
ordeals. Cut off from friends, community and our surroundings we have become
accustomed to.

Making a middle-class lifestyle in the Bay Area affordable, with better
transit, will go a long way.

~~~
bwy
Your first paragraph sounds so dramatic that I was expecting you to laugh the
idea off as a joke at the end, but you didn't. It sounds like you're 100%
serious. Is this actually the case? Don't mean to pry, but it sounds a little
extreme, and I wonder if this has happened either to you or anyone you know. I
grew up in Irvine (mentioned below as similar to PA) and no one I knew would
have banished anyone for getting B's or not getting a nice job. We were normal
kids.

~~~
TheEzEzz
You aren't literally banished. What happens is that if you can't succeed at a
high enough level, then you won't be able to afford to live in the same type
of community as an adult. Economic banishment, not social, although the social
separation happens as a knock-on effect. As social/tribal creatures this is
absolutely a huge deal psychologically.

~~~
malchow
I think this is the root of it. The high cost of living (high property values,
high taxes, high regulation around inputs like fuel and wages) mean that being
able to put four walls around a family and feel even a modicum of financial
security requires a staggering -- a simply staggering -- income.

If one looks at the inputs into the cost-of-living issue, I suspect one would
actually find that much of the pressure cooker atmosphere is the result of bad
policy. There's no shortage of land, energy, labor, or even water* in Silicon
Valley. But there's an enforced shortage of these things, and the resulting
high prices create the "banishment effect" for these children.

* Since I'll take some flak for this, here's one supporting view: [http://www.city-journal.org/2015/cjc0402vdh.html](http://www.city-journal.org/2015/cjc0402vdh.html)

------
tokenadult
It's not clear that kids in Palo Alto really are killing themselves at
unusually high rates over the long term. There was a recent suicide cluster
there, but any event that is random will clump in some location some time, and
maybe there is nothing about Palo Alto itself that produced the recent clump.
For sure, any event that happens in Palo Alto grabs the connection of well
connected people who can get lots of media attention for their concerns, so
there has been a lot of reporting and commentary about this issue. This
article kindly submitted for our discussion from the _Modern Luxury_ website
is just the latest in a large collection of articles by nonspecialists on
suicide in Palo Alto. But maybe the problem will appear to go away as the
random clumping of individual suicides occurs in some poorer and less well
connected community next year.

Of course I desire for all young people everywhere to live long, healthy, and
happy lives, and if there is something toxic about the culture in Palo Alto,
let's by all means do something to fix it. But one part of that effort is to
better understand suicide and its prevention, a topic I post about fairly
often here on Hacker News. (Check my other posts just from today. I research
this issue a lot.) A lot of the commentary I have read about Palo Alto this
year has been heavy on speculation but very light on verifiable facts, and I
think, with all due respect, that an important issue like youth suicide
deserves to be treated factually and carefully.

~~~
sonoffett
The mantra of the fundamental materialist is always "it is only a coincidence"
and it is quite useful to recite to explain away topics that might make one
uncomfortable. Another good one is "correlation is not equal to causation"
(except when it agrees with my preconceived reality tunnel). If you repeat it
enough times or with enough conviction it might even start to sound true!

I attended Gunn in 2006 and this was happening in waves before I got there and
continues to happen in waves since. There are guards that sit by the tracks
(sometimes 24/7) to look out for students who are looking to take their lives
in this specific way (buy them a coffee or donut on a cold night, they'll
appreciate it). This is occurring at one of the most educated, affluent areas
in the world. Hell even Radiohead poked fun at how perfect the place is. My AP
CS class covered topics that weren't even included in my undergraduate CS
degree at top ranked UC, and my social network from this school is more
influential than any networks I made in college or graduate school.

If the suicide rate did meet some statistical "norm" then _that_ would be
exceptional. Why are kids killing themselves in utopia? Why are some of the
worlds most intelligent, rich, and power adults burying their children?

EDIT: "paid guards" -> "guards".

~~~
nekitamo
>If the suicide rate did meet some statistical "norm" then that would be
exceptional. Why are kids killing themselves in utopia? Why are some of the
worlds most intelligent, rich, and power adults burying their children?

Gunn '08 graduate here. It's because these intelligent, rich, and powerful
adults are used to pushing themselves to the max, and they put the same
pressure on their kids. However, not all children are like their parents, and
a lot of them can't take the pressure.

Growing up in Palo Alto is weird, especially if you've lived somewhere else.
Everyone is pigeonholed into being academically successful, creative, bright,
and happy. All the parents want their children to be successful like they are.
All the teachers want to create a demanding and rigorous academic environment
that pushes these kids to the limit. But no one ever asks the children what
they want, or gives them room to develop an identity of their own.

Instead, from the age of 7 you're expected to spend 8:00am - 3:00pm in school.
After school your schedule is stuffed with extracurricular activities, ranging
from sports to speech and debate to Kumon. Then you get home around 6-7pm and
work on homework til midnight. Get up the next morning at 6:45am, rinse and
repeat.

If you don't follow this schedule, if you opt out and don't take the required
extra-curriculars or get a B in Algerba 2A/Geometry instead of an A, you're
viewed as a loser. You're on the path to becoming a nobody in life. You're
nothing.

So kids opt out by getting shit grades, playing video games, doing drugs, and
some have serious mental issues and end up killing themselves. The adults then
all get up in a panic. The teachers make long speeches about how they're here
to help. The parents go to meetings and undertake inane measures such as
posting guards at Caltrain, which doesn't really do anything.

Meanwhile, nothing changes. The teachers continue to assign an insane academic
load, and give no room to the kids to breathe with the endless homework
assignments. The parents continue pressuring their kids, because "yeah that
other kid killed himself, but surely that won't happen to my child. My child
will grow up to be smart happy and ambitious like me..."

... right?

~~~
ArkyBeagle
Extracurriculars should be _radically_ optional, especially if the kids are
actually doing homework until midnight. that's just not enough zone out time.

With my own kids, if they didn't absolutely love something, I always
recommended them to drop it. They both found one, maybe two things that they
loved and added value, and that seems to have worked out.

One of them made a living for a span of time talking college student who grew
up that way off the proverbial ledge when it all melted down. But she'd also
had enough freedom to e-publish a book by the time she was 12.

Growing up, the people that over-regimented their children's live were called
"Colonel von Trapp" by my parents, in my presence, possibly to their face.

------
paloaltokid
I grew up in Palo Alto, attended Palo Alto High School, and this is not at all
surprising.

The train tracks are literally _right outside_ the school. Depending on where
you're coming from, you may cross these tracks every day. If you're having
suicidal thoughts it is extremely easy to step in front of the train.

I can also attest to the pressure that Palo Alto kids face growing up. It's an
intense environment and the assumption is that you should be aiming to get
into an Ivy, Stanford/Cal, or another top-tier school. (Stanford University is
literally right across the street from Paly). Many kids in PA high schools
have parents who work at big successful firms or at the universities so
there's also a lot of pressure just to achieve what your parents have
accomplished.

Many kids at Paly used drugs of some type to cope, and often the most high-
achieving kids used the most drugs. I knew a lot of kids who used Adderall or
similar drugs to get studying done or push through deadlines. Palo Alto
parties are crazy - the kids have lots of money and easy access to get any
kind of drugs they like.

I can only imagine that as the years have gone on the pressure has gone up.

~~~
eonw
The drug abuse part is interesting... The highschool I went to had drug
problems, mostly smoking weed and a bit of cocaine, run of the mill shall we
say. As a senior I made friends with kids from a private school nearby...
every single of one of them was a drug addict, in fact a number of them have
since gone to prison. I always thought it curious that parents send their kids
to private or high end schools thinking it will protect then, when in my
experience it has always been the opposite.

~~~
paloaltokid
Yeah, it seems like kids from more affluent backgrounds often get into greater
trouble. A lot of the kids I knew felt tremendous pressure to do everything
right. They _had_ to get into Stanford because that's where Mom or Dad went.
They _had_ to get into an Ivy or their life was over. Most Palo Alto kids,
even the "slackers" are very smart and capable, so they could pull it off, no
matter the cost. But it certainly took a huge toll on them.

I knew several kids who exploded in one way or another. Some years ago I got a
call from an ex-girlfriend who had just gone through AA; she partied like
crazy all through high school. Intense home background with parents who were
doctors and expected much from her. She is now better but had to go through
hell to find life on her terms.

------
austenallred
There was a community similar to Palo Alto close to me (affluent, very
achieving- their high school everything was supposed to be the best at
everything). The children were supposed to be perfect - academically,
socially, spiritually, etc.

When I hung out with kids from there, it seemed like they were living their
entire lives inside of a giant pressure cooker. There was always an underlying
social pressure that everything they did should be perfect -- nothing would be
accepted but the best. Their football team went 10-3 one year, and the
football coach got fired. It was insanity.

The brutal thing is that not everybody can be the best. Even if the basketball
team is winning the state title every year, only a select handful make the
basketball team.

The smartest ones in that community were the ones that rebelled enough that
the expectations were lower for them. One of my buddies bought a one-way
ticket to Thailand without telling his parents, and came back a few months
later. He said he felt appreciated for the first time; it was heartbreaking
that it took something like that. For the others - no matter how much they
excelled, it wasn't enough.

I want my kids to be able to live in a high-quality environment, but at a
certain point it's just not worth it anymore. Palo Alto, full of tech
millionaires/billionaires and the highest-achieving of the overachievers, must
be absolutely brutal.

~~~
rralian
Oof, not to bring down the level of conversation, but fuck that (the
environment you describe, not your comment). I am concerned for my kids'
future lives, but I'm not overly concerned about perfect scores or anything
like that. I would prefer to instill in them a passion for something--anything
really.

I went to a _pretty good_ school (Northwestern), and while I don't regret it,
I also don't think it's particularly affected my life one way or another. A
state school diploma could have gotten me into my first position, and from
there on out it was my performance that led me from one step to the next. It
wasn't until I started to learn and build things for the love of it that I
really started to create bigger and better opportunities.

I now live in a community in Austin that has some similarities to what you're
describing. Super-competitive, high-achievers. But I think it's important to
maintain a healthy appreciation for the artifice of it all. And while we
encourage and try to feed the strengths and interests of our kids (I am
helping my 6-year-old prep for an advanced math class), I think it's more
important to try to raise happy, well-adjusted, non-jerk kids.

~~~
javert
> But I think it's important to maintain a healthy appreciation for the
> artifice of it all

I don't think it's artifice. If you want to get into the best universities,
you have to have perfect grades and stand out. I think the culture being
described in Palo Alto is a direct function of that.

You can raise happy, well-adjusted, non-jerk kids, but they won't get into
good schools, because they won't sacrifice literally everything in high
school.

Your choice: well-adjusted kids or getting into good universities, not both.

I think it's horrible that this is the situation---we need to reform
university admissions.

My idea would be to have an over-achievement threshhold, above which students
won't get accepted.

I had a perfect GPA in high school, and that's because there was something
profoundly wrong with me.

~~~
rralian
To be fair, I haven't tried to get into a good school recently, so my
perspective may be out of date. But I don't think perfect grades actually
stand out at all. Doing something noteworthy because you are following your
passion however would. I also think there is ample opportunity for really
smart people to do incredible things without going to a "good" school.
Honestly, university is not a goal, it is a means towards your later life, and
it gets less and less important as you live your life. If my kids find
something they care about and follow it early, I would not be disappointed at
all if they never went to college.

~~~
tsotha
Yeah, part of the problem is perfect grades no longer stand out much. Top tier
colleges continually turn away students with perfect grades and very high test
scores.

I have nieces and nephews that age, and from what I can tell getting in to a
good college is an unpaid full time job now. Instead of working part time at
McDonald's summers for spending money, these kids are being pushed to do
things like create nonprofits for whatever "social justice" fad is in this
year, or spending a month feeding people in Haiti.

That kind of stuff is fine if the drive is coming from within, but I would
sure as hell have chafed at being forced into sainthood at age 16 in order to
have a chance at being accepted to an Ivy.

~~~
javert
During the school year, getting into a good college is much more than a full
time job. It's an "all the time" job (except sleeping). And by "good college"
I don't mean Ivy League, I also mean the next tier down.

Good grades no longer stand out... but _not_ having good grades stands out! So
you have to have excellent grades.

------
throw_it_away
Downvote me all you want. But I cannot put myself into these children's shoes.

I grew up on the 'other side of the tracks', but in the Bay Area. I grew up in
an immigrant ghetto. Our plight was unheard of, unremarkable. Broken families,
abusive parents, a failing school district, gang violence. These were all
parts of my everyday reality. A couple of students in our school struggled to
keep ourselves academically grounded in a world with few academic successes.
Every day a small cohort of us would struggle to reconcile the beauty we found
in mathematics with the twenty voices in class: "Teacher, why do we even need
Geometry? Nobody uses it in the real world." In our world of McDonalds
managers, dry cleaners, and landscapers, this was reality. Trigonometry was as
useful as learning to mine for coal.

So when I see this outpouring of sympathy and intellectual support for kids in
Palo Alto, I struggle to stifle a knee-jerk reaction that can only be
described by abject cruelty. I understand that the local community is
devastated. But the amount of emotional and intellectual outpouring by Silicon
Valley engineers for these children baffles me because of how _useless_ it
feels. The rich, with their systemic advantages, create a high pressure
environment, leading kids to commit suicide. The alumni of the rich use their
resources to try and fix this problem. Wouldn't these engineers better spend
their time trying to fix the problems faced by hundreds of thousands of
underprivileged schoolchildren each day, rather than the localized plight of a
few children in a ridiculously affluent community?

This continues to remind me that the poor and disaffected are a footnote,
whose cause is championed by poor newspaper editors, while the rich champion
their own through and through.

~~~
iolothebard
So you lack empathy and can't understand that the stresses of their community
while not equaling yours can easily rival it in stress and seriousness to a
teenager.

Kudos on making it out, it's sad though that you can't see it from a child's
perspective.

I guess you just need someone that's in a more harsh ghetto to make your story
sound like it's irrelevant since their situation was worse. Try Latin American
ghettos, SE Asia, most of Africa, etc.

~~~
throw_it_away
>I guess you just need someone that's in a more harsh ghetto to make your
story sound like it's irrelevant since their situation was worse. Try Latin
American ghettos, SE Asia, most of Africa, etc.

And we're not posting articles about how the Rockefellers and Carnegies
children are suffering impostor syndrome are we? You miss the point I'm trying
to make.

There is a very specific thing here that interests HN readers. Why is it an
article about PAHS kids who commit suicide appearing, not an article about the
Carnegies, not the starving children in Asian ghettos?

HN readers must be, somehow, empathizing with this children. This is a fault
of the programmer elite as a whole. We are extremely privileged. We are well
educated, well compensated, extremely capable people. Instead of focusing our
intellect, our will, and our drive upon eradicating world poverty, instead we
try to help a small enclave of mentally troubled students in an affluent
microcosm. We don't treat depression or mental illness as an institutional
problem. We don't look at the social issues of parenting methods. No, instead
we try specifically looking at kids in Palo Alto and why they are committing
suicide. Why is this? I suspect it's because many of the readers here,
themselves, went to Palo Alto schools, or come from elite backgrounds. They
feel deeply for this particular space because they see themselves as part of
it. And that's a sad waste of our talents.

Many, many issues need our help. Mental illness awareness. Income inequality
and its effects on humanity. Poverty, welfare. Parenting as a lasting
influence on children. Not PAHS suicides. Engineers, stop wasting your cycles
on your own, and spend it on helping the rest. Be more like SpaceX and less
like Washio.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>Instead of focusing our intellect, our will, and our drive upon eradicating
world poverty

I'd love to eradicate world poverty, and cure depression also. But you can't
do that with gadgets, can you? And what will anyone pay you for in tech other
than gadgets? You still have to keep _yourself_ from slipping into poverty,
using only the skillset you actually have (rather than flooding the nonprofit
and government sectors with workers they can't even afford to hire right now),
_while also_ somehow eradicating poverty and curing depression.

There's a reason HBO's _Silicon Valley_ made "Making the world a better place"
into an _ironic_ slogan, and it's because all the techno-wizardry in the
world, short of a few scifi dreams like replicators and AGI, can only do so
much against what are fundamentally social problems, problems of small groups
of humans _refusing to share_ technology and its outputs.

Fuck, the best I can think of right now is: would ultra-low-power computing
maybe help ameliorate the power-consumption issues that exacerbate global
warming? Or would they just make the world emit even more carbon?

------
Foy
Anecdotal, but I chat with a friend from San Francisco and he was telling me
recently that he was feeling down because a funeral was coming up. It was
about the 6th or 7th death of someone close to him that he had experienced,
about half of them being suicides.

I can't even begin to fathom what that must feel like, I don't know anyone but
older family members who have passed away.

------
steven777400
Teenage years are already tough years for many people. Being forced (by
accident of birth) into such a self-described high intensity, high competition
environment sounds pretty horrible for those not predisposed to more "average"
levels of achievement. Looking around, all that's visible is young and older
people all high achieving, and then if your scores or whatever slip a little,
you ask, "Is there any place for me here?"

~~~
iolothebard
A woefully tragic "flyover state".

OMG, how do people even live there? ;-)

My quality of life here in Oklahoma far outstrips mine when I lived in SF,
Redwood City & Pacifica (I did like a lot about the Bay Area though, just not
a good match for me).

------
olivermarks
I've lived in the bay area for 25 years and know PA well. Since no one else
has mentioned this yet, I would suspect a high percentage of the family homes
are pressure cookers. The assumption that parents are steadily accruing wealth
in high pressure but highly successful jobs is erroneous: the silicon valley
culture is more akin to tight rope walking. The failure rate (and suicides) of
entrepreneurs is very high and it doesn't take much in a very expensive part
of the world for a job loss to turn into a very stressful scramble for
financial survival. Imagine being an adolescent growing up in that type of
pressure cooker world...

------
fiatmoney
The concept of "elite overproduction" is very relevant here. Essentially, more
aspirants for elite positions than there are slots, mixed with a declining
standard of living.

Personally, this tends to lead to psychotic depression as one's aspirations
are effectively slowly drowned. Socially, this isn't a good thing since lower-
elite strata dis-integrated from wider society tend to be the ones who start
violent revolutions. As a minor example Occupy Wall Street was in no small
part driven by out-of-work grads with no realistic shot at the mainstream
elite career they were preparing for.

------
DanBC
One thing that articles like this frequently don't mention: lousy reporting
makes suicide more likely.

We know that there is an element of "contagion" about suicide. We know the way
it is reported can either drive rates of suicide up or down.

There's a bunch of language and imagery in this article that will increase the
risk of people attempting suicide.

It is particularly frustrating when the article mentions the spike in calls
after reporting of Robin Williams suicide -- they know it happens but refuse
to take responsibility to reduce it.

If you want to help You could look at getting ASIST (Applied Suicide
Intervention Skills Training (yes, training training)) will give you usable
skills that keep people alive.

[http://www.chooselife.net/Training/asist.aspx](http://www.chooselife.net/Training/asist.aspx)

There's a bunch of stuff that indicates mental health provision is poor. EG:

> Lisa hasn’t found the grief counselors provided by the school to be of much
> help.

We know that grief counseling probably doesn't work and that it might be
harmful.

------
kposehn
It hurts me how thoughtless suicide with a train is. The engineer often
suffers from PTSD and many (a closely guarded but often too high ratio) are
never able to work again. People who have only one way to avert catastrophe -
"dump the air" plus emergency brakes to stop the train as fast as possible -
become lost in the horrible run-up to impact.

Suicide is never the answer, especially when it can ruin the life of another
and lead to their own suicide. A chain of deaths that ripples through
communities far removed from the place it starts.

~~~
hitekker
In Japan, I believe they try to discourage death-by-train by making the
suicide victim's family pay for the cleanup.

I don't know what the numbers are (if suicides have decreased as a result of
this policy) but I suspect this only makes matter even worse for those left
behind.

~~~
kposehn
Wow. I did not know that.

It might actually be effective, as family impact is a big part of the culture
and social responsibility in Japan.

------
WillPostForFood
_The largest he labeled “Palo Alto,” the second “Male.” In the center circle
was the word “Asian.” “It seems,” he wrote, “that the demographic most at risk
are Asian (Chinese) males in high school (hey, that’s what I am!).” It was an
unmissable observation: Zhu’s suicide was the third in a row by an Asian
male._

In Palo Alto, and here in the comments as well, people refuse to discuss the
most obvious connection to the suicides, the huge Chinese immigrant population
in Palo Alto. And the pressure applied by tiger parents.

~~~
meatysnapper
Bingo.

Friends in East Asia (specifically Korea and China) have long told me about
the insane academic pressure over there and the spectacular amount of suicides
of young people.

------
eonw
an affluent neighborhood in Seattle recently had a cluster of teenage
suicides. I think it must be hard to live up to expectations, real or imagined
in a place like PA where incomes are skyhigh and that becomes the expected
outcome/path, it must be very easy to become disenchanted and inadequate. I
think these kids do not realize that most of that talent was imported to where
it "fit", so these kids should be taught that there are other bubbles they can
go to that they will fit into. not all of the world is obsessed with startups
and valuations. If you are good at sports, go to a place that like sports, if
you like the outdoors, move to the mountains, etc.

~~~
sjg007
I think you can still be house broke even if you own a $2m house in Palo Alto.

------
samstave
When I was building out El Camino Hospital, Lucile Packard's Children's
Hospital was taking up a wing on the top floor, moving in from their other
location at Stanford.

I got to know the LPCH people during the project, and they told me that the
majority of their patients are preteen girls with severe eating disorders.
They said that most of them were from extremely wealthy families in the bay
area, and that their parents were typically super achievers in tech - that
these kids felt neglected by their parents and stressed about the expectations
put on them, and this was how they reacted.

------
mathattack
My 2 cents...

1 - It is due to academic pressure. You can't opt out of academics like you
can if you're not good as sports or music. The parents have High IQ jobs, so
this is what people aspire for.

2 - It is a shame.

3 - Guards at the train stations, while necessary, attack the symptom.

4 - I think a lot can be done by encouraging choice in high schools. The Palo
Alto elementary schools have a lot of choice. Some are academic, some are more
progressive play based, some are language immersion... I would like to see the
Palo Alto schools offer such choices. Why not have schools or programs for the
visual artists? Or musicians? Or people very into computers? Or other
languages? Encouraging kids to find excellence in areas other than AP courses
will go a long way.

------
tonydiv
The article makes it sound like the percentage of students having suicidal
thoughts is abnormal. It's actually 1% less than the national average... 3.7%
is the national average for adults 18+, the article reports 50/1900 students.

~~~
DanBC
Are you comparing like with like? The article talks about students
hospitalised with suicidal thinking; is your figure for people hospitalised
for suicidal thinking or does it include people in the community that have
less strong suicidal ideation?

------
sjg007
Honestly, therapy should be part of the curriculum. So many kids come from
fucked up situations be it their parents, peers, anxiety, etc... There is
likely a silent fraction that do ok enough in the system who are missed
because they don't exhibit obvious symptoms (failing grades, behavioral
problems) etc... Of course this is probably impossible to implement since it
requires parental permission and is likely to cost a lot.

------
skier123
Sacred Heart, St. Francis, Menlo-Atherton, are some of the most popular high
schools in the area(Palo Alto High School is ghetto).The truth is that there
are a lot of spoiled brats at these schools who are entitled and think they
are the best things ever. Their parents spoil them and their kids constantly
harass and bully other kids. I have friends who have gone to all these high
schools and the students there are horrible.

------
GuiA
It seems like one of the root causes behind dreadful situations such as the
one described in the article is that the various groups of actors in the
system (students, school officials, teachers, parents, etc.) aren't in tune
enough with each other. There are many nodes in the graph, but it's quite
sparse.

Quotes from the article:

 _> "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."_

 _> Lisa hasn’t found the grief counselors provided by the school to be of
much help. “They kind of, like, force you to talk to them,” she says, “but you
don’t know them, and they don’t know you, and every time you get a brand-new
person.”_

 _> Kathleen Blanchard, the mother of Jean-Paul, who died in 2009, has some
simple advice for parents: “Talk less. Listen more. Listen deeply.” She’s
speaking at a community event to an auditorium full of parents who are
wondering what, if any, signals she saw in her son. “He sent out signs to
people by phone and online,” she says. “He even let people know that he
intended to take his life. But they didn’t understand.”_

There's a reason why pedagogies like Montessori/Waldorf/etc. schools tend to
work well. The educators who designed those systems understood the importance
of having tight feedback loops and small social groups for children to develop
into fulfilled, productive citizens.

Having teachers who get to know the students over several years, in small
classrooms, with healthy parental involvement, and school officials that are
in tune with what's happening really does help. It's the kind of stuff that
just seems like commons sense when you see it in practice, and yet the vast
majority of our schools are diametrically opposed to that. It's really
enraging: we know what the properties of good schools and good teachers are,
and what the properties of bad schools and bad teachers are - and yet we
ignore all of it and perpetuate a model that hasn't changed much in the past
200 years. Modern schools - and particularly middle and high schools - are a
toxic environment in which it's surprising that some kids manage to flourish
at all.

Like 'tokenadult said, it's unclear whether there is a statistical
significance to the suicides. But hearing the students interviewed for the
article, it's evident that they are deeply unhappy. When you observe the
social structure they spend their lives in, with Silicon Valley overachiever
culture added on top, it's not hard to see why.

------
cmdrfred
I always wondered what if this was discovered to be genetic like
homosexuality? What this isn't a bug of natural selection, but a feature.

~~~
random_pr
our best guess is that homosexuality is partly explained by genetics, not
fully. there's lots of headlines saying "genetic link for homosexuality
found", which is ambiguous, so it's an understandable mistake.

by partly, I mean that we've found larger genetic links between 'propensity to
work hard', and for IQ, than we have for homosexuality.

in the say way, I think we have indeed found some manner of link between
genetics and depression, but again, it's sort of a tenuous thing.

~~~
cmdrfred
Human behavior can never be fully explained by genetics, but a lot of these
studies conflate 'homosexuals' and 'men who have sex with men' and there might
lie the ambiguity.

------
AdreKnowChrome
Reposted from : [http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/03/25/guest-
opinion-...](http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/03/25/guest-opinion-the-
sorrows-of-young-palo-altans)

Dear Palo Alto,

As a product of Gunn and the PAUSD system (JLS, Nixon), I feel obligated to
write yet another post.

I am 26, out of college (UCSD) and working at "G __ __* ", an ideal dream for
any Palo Alto "product".

Increasingly, I am disheartened to see what has become of Gunn. The rash of
suicide began immediately after my departure has yet to be addressed.

To me, the problem is much larger than homework. I took 6 APs classes, had a
GPA of 4.0+, participated in extracurriculars and jumped through each hoop
required to become an admirable college applicant. There was plenty of
homework and stress, but to me, and many I knew, that was not the largest
problem. I fell victim of depression and the classic existential crises that
plague teenagers. However, there is truly no support system at Gunn. As a
student you have the choice of Parents (no teenager talks to them), Counselor
(stigma associated), Teacher (rare to talk about anything outside of school
with). This deficit leaves no guidance for these youth, especially those
looking for help.

I recently went to a workshop on grief with Sobonfu Some. I asked her about
why these deaths were happening and how to address it. The answer is what we
all know, but choose to ignore. There is a lack of soul in Palo Alto. We spend
too much time distracting ourselves and our children. We do not connect
genuinely with ourselves or our youth. On top of this thought, we do not deal
with grief, and lack the support system to allow our children proper spaces
and vessels to air their grief and other emotions. At its core, we lack a true
overarching community, one that bridges education and family life. She also
said "Nobody has ever committed suicide without asking for help."\-- a key
point.

For me, the nature of the pressure wasn't the most difficult challenge, but
the culture and environment. The lack of self-discovery, the lack of community
and most of all, the lack of a meaningful path make growing up in Palo Alto an
innately hollow experience.

When you look around Silicon Valley, you see obsession with wealth, speed and
disruption. We ceate and drive consumption without any intention, forming
vehicles of distraction, ultimately supporting products/markets that do not
serve us, humanity or society.

Palo Alto used to be the forefront of novel, progressive thinking. In this
last internet boom, Silicon Valley has become more akin to Beverly Hills than
Santa Cruz. If we examine the correlation between youth suicide and IPOs, they
correlate well. ;)

I ask Palo Alto for a critical examination of how these market shifts affect
our interpersonal culture and suicide rate.

For a place that values disruption so much, why do we, as Palo Altans, have
such a hard time disrupting our own educational system to solve these issues?
Where have these institutions and systems failed us? Why do we continue to
allow our culture to become a barrier to happiness, when we never let it form
a barrier to money?

Enough about problems. Here are my solutions:

1) Mandatory Nature Education and Retreat.

"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where
nature may heal and give strength to body and soul." John Muir

If students were allowed to spend time in nature and see how it can serve as a
higher power if needed. The need of students, as society as a whole, to
reconnect with the earth is central to existential crisis.

2) Palo Alto Alumni Mentorship Network (PAMN)

A network of Alumni and recent grads, willing to receive mentorship as well as
be mentors to produce a support network. I have spoke with many grads in my
age range (21-30) and all have been supportive and excited about this idea.
This structure allows for people of all ages to support and in turn be
supported. A system like this makes isolation much more difficult.

3) Places to Express themselves and to experience experience ecstatic of
judgment--Teenage Centric

We need teen groups and other sacred space, where kids can go to speak
honestly, openly and without fear of being judged. I know groups presently do
this (Ecstatic Dance Palo Alto), but they are not catered to teens. The host
of Ecstatic Dance Palo Alto is open to starting teen groups.

I welcome feedback and support. I am willing to take lead on these initiatives
and will be reaching out to the school board about them as well.

Feel free to email: [removed]

May we all heal together.

Cheers, A-D-

Ps. Reason is Illusion

------
petersouth
I don't know if any studies have confirmed this, but it seems that smarter
people are more susceptible to severe depression.

~~~
Cloudy
Yes, here is a graph detailing that phenomenon [1]

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/4TK2Hu4.gif](http://i.imgur.com/4TK2Hu4.gif)

------
swamp40
For whatever reason, these things come in waves.

Four suicides at one high school in one year increases the likelihood of a
fifth.

------
MichaelCrawford
I don't know about Palo Alto kids specifically, but I do know that there have
always been a lot of suicides among Caltech students as well as the faculty. I
don't know about the non-faculty staff.

A friend of mine, Misha Mahowald, made it plainly apparent that she would win
the nobel someday, then hurled herself in front of a train at the age of 33.

A brilliant young astronomy professor, whose name I don't recall, paid cash
for a brand-new red convertible sports car, drove it at twice the speed limit
from pasadena to palomar mountain then over a precipice.

While I was at the Intitute, I was told that there were quite a few suicides
among caltech students but that the institute worked to keep them quiet lest
there be an epidemic of suicides.

Not long after I left - but with the intention to return - I thumbed a ride
with an off-duty pasadena emergency medical technician. When I told him I was
a Caltech physics student, he shouted with great joy "CALTECH HAS SUCH
SPECTACULAR SUICIDES!"

~~~
selimthegrim
Well these days they mostly tend to involve helium, from what I hear through
the grapevine. I hope Pasadena EMS is getting their rocks off some other way.

~~~
MichaelCrawford
I once had a friend who was a surgical nurse. She regarded cardiac surgeons as
freaks. She was completely convinced that they practiced surgery because
serial murder was illegal.

------
andyl
I went to a forum the other day in Mtn View where HS kids talked about their
experience and the pressures they felt. Takeaways include: talk to your kids,
don't be a helicopter parent, don't expect that your kids will want what you
want. It's ok for them to take a different path.

The kids believed that many of the recent suicides did not have to happen -
important for people to check-in regularly and ask how things are going. Kids
won't always tell their parents - peers and teachers play an important role.

Somewhat surprising to me: reports of self-harm (cutting etc.) and eating
disorders amongst girls. The kids said this doesn't get talked about much but
is super common.

The forum was a nice way to listen & learn. IMHO community events like this
would be more effective than track-side guards.

