Suicide Expert Madelyn Gould Reacts to Teen Suicides in CA

(November 2, 2009)  

Grim news hit this university town in late October just two days before a PTA forum on teenage stress: Another Palo Alto teen had died after stepping in front of a commuter train, the fourth such suicide in less than six months. <br><br>

 

Experts have struggled to understand what generates clusters of teen suicides, a phenomenon that breaks into a community''s awareness when they occur in a public place, as they did in Palo Alto. But officials in this San Francisco peninsula city of about 59,000 say they''re deploying a wide array of approaches to stop it from growing. <br><br>

 

Those efforts are moving with greater urgency since the most recent suicide on Oct. 19 that involved a 16-year-old male student at Henry M. Gunn High School. Two other Gunn students, a 17-year-old boy in May and a 17-year-old girl a month later, also took their own lives on the train tracks. A 13-year-old girl died the same way in August, days before she was to become a Gunn freshman. At least one Gunn student, another 17-year-old boy, was prevented from killing himself in June after his mother followed him to the tracks. <br><br>

 

Suicide is the third-leading cause of death among people between the ages of 15 and 24 in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But school, social stress, romantic problems or even having a classmate who died by suicide are rarely big enough triggers alone to cause a teenager to end his or her life, said Madeline Gould, a Columbia University psychiatrist. She found evidence of 50 suicide clusters nationwide between 1987 and 1996. <br><br>

 

The clusters, which resulted in about 200 deaths, constituted 2 percent or fewer of all youth suicides during that period, she said.

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"These poor kids died from an untreated psychiatric illness, or undertreated. It''s not as if it''s a mysterious thing and it''s not as if it''s not preventable," Gould said. "Unfortunately, there is the misconception that if someone wants to die by suicide, it''s inevitable. That''s not the case. The impulse to kill yourself waxes and wanes."

  

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