Why Are Palo Alto's Kids Killing Themselves?

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

by austenallred • 11 years ago

112 127 11 years ago

gargarplex• 11 years ago

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.

runamok3• 11 years ago

I used to live in Irvine which strikes me as very similar to PA (I live Mountain View now). The pressure put on kids there is incredible. And it starts from a very young age.

Frankly the kids are way, way sharper than most adults I meet. Even in the bay area.

Florin_Andrei• 11 years ago

I think you nailed it.

I live in the area and I have two kids in middle school. It's incredibly hard to not get sucked into keeping up with the Joneses here.

runamok3• 11 years ago

I think that keeps me from wanting to have kids (besides my own innate selfishness and desire to continue investing all my energy into myself/gf vs. little ones).

I would want to provide them the luxury of being a silly kid and the ability to explore and just mess around. To be curious without everything being an ulterior motive for succeeding. Because from age 20 or so til 65 you are expected to work your ass off in our culture. On the other hand it feels like a disservice to them since all these crazy alpha parents are driving their kids hard from a young age.

So kudos to you for trying to find a balance.

up_and_up• 11 years ago

I wonder how many residents in PA came from elsewhere with very different upbringings? I bet most CEO's and execs in SV were not raised in the pressurized environment of SV.

ZanyProgrammer• 11 years ago

No, but a lot of the people in PA aren't CEOs and execs. Upper class, well educated and affluent doesn't mean they are all VCs.

chralieboy• 11 years ago

Reminds me of the great line from Jeffrey Eugenides:

"There is no evidence against genetic determinism more damning than the children of the rich.”

gdulli• 11 years ago

On the other hand, these suicides threaten the well-known saying that "wealth lasts three generations".

jtzhou• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

rrich• 11 years ago

Horrific! Is this just an exaggeration? Is this a real reflection of the environment the Bay Area offers to families in such a prospering economy?

selimthegrim4• 11 years ago

But I mean wtf is this? Is Gunn comparable to TJ or Bronx or Stuyvesant where this is actually making you reasonably competitive at the higher level of entering STEM undergrad institutions? Why have these kids got it in their heads that the Gunn curriculum is so important? I didn't think this was a selective magnet school?

mathattack3• 11 years ago

It's not a magnet. Horace Mann is more comparable. Similar socio-economics and pressure, and everyone is up against the same thing. They draw the wealthiest, but not necessarily the smartest.

Stuy and Bronx Science are entrance exam based, so those going there are at the top of the heap academically to begin with.

nilkn• 11 years ago

I worked once with a recent college graduate who grew up in a very wealthy neighborhood. He drove a Ferrari to work. His mom was a supermodel and his dad a hugely successful big-city attorney. They lived in a $2M mansion. (Keep in mind that this was not in CA.)

He probably made about $60k.

It was clear he was having a hard time grasping the vast gap between the life he was able to afford on his own and the life he had growing up. In under a year, he quit to take a 100% remote job specifically so he could move back in with his parents.

nickbauman• 11 years ago

I have friends who live in Palo Alto. One works for a company that starts with the letter A the other works for a company that starts with the letter F. The two of them rent a little townhouse for something like $3000 a month. I live in a 4 bedroom home in downtown Minneapolis that I mortgage for less than $800 / mo. It will be paid off in 5 years. While I don't make what they make, I'm within reaching distance and I don't have to break my neck to get it.

The financial arithmetic of living in Silicon valley alone doesn't attract me. But the work-yourself-to-death culture is enough to warrant the place a wide berth. My brother died suddenly a few years ago. He was here one moment. Gone the next. So be here, now. You'll never get another chance.

Foy• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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?"

iolothebard2• 11 years ago

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).

tokenadult• 11 years ago

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.

11thEarlOfMar2• 11 years ago

'something toxic about the culture'

My kids attend a different Silicon Valley school that has an academic culture that I find very difficult to understand. A very high number of students load up on college-level advanced placement courses starting their sophomore year. A 'B' is considered a failing grade. What is baffling to me is that the bulk of the pressure is peer pressure, and not directly from teachers or parents. It is typical that kids who transfer to high schools in other states wind up as valedictorians, where they'd barely make the top 10% here.

Jocks, burnouts and socialites seems so, so long ago.

jjtheblunt• 11 years ago

Are there any jocks? Or, are all the kids only encouraged to worship academics?

branchan2• 11 years ago

I guess if you're a kid living in Palo Alto, you are living in an environment where everyone and everyone's parents are high achievers and that is what is expected of you. In order to get admitted to the best colleges, everyone is gunning for the straight A's. If all your peers are getting straight A's and you get a B, yea I can see how that can have an impact on you, seeing that that now takes you to the bottom of the rankings.

bluemeniscus• 11 years ago

I highly recommend arranging a screening of the documentary "A Race to Nowhere". It was an eye opener for me and other parents in Los Alamos (a NM town with many similarities I think) and places this peer pressure into proper perspective for parents, kids, as well as teachers.

cf http://www.racetonowhere.com/about-film

geoelectric• 11 years ago

Not that I think this is conscious, per se, but I think part of it might be driven by the need for their school to be a "top school." It's not enough just to take AP courses and get As, the overall ranking of the school you do it at ends up affecting your admission chances. Staff might have similar concerns around funding.

That probably puts a lot of pressure on all the students to keep up the standard, probably past a level that makes sense for any diverse student body.

mathattack3• 11 years ago

My sense is that it's cultural, and not clustering. The kids have an awful lot of academic pressure. In most schools, the mediocre football players just give up on the team. These kids don't feel able to quit the academics.

Seeing the guards at the Caltrains is very sad.

paloaltokid5• 11 years ago

I agree that it's cultural. The pressure growing up in Palo Alto is unbelievable.

sonoffett2• 11 years ago

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".

AdreKnowChrome4• 11 years ago

SGTM +1

mbillie12• 11 years ago

Why are kids killing themselves in utopia? Why are some of the worlds most intelligent, rich, and power adults burying their children?

I think the ideas that Palo Alto is "utopia," and that intelligence, wealth and power are all you need to make your children happy, are really quite telling. Perhaps expensive houses and influential careers are orthogonal to children's happiness and well-being, or perhaps even an intensely competitive career- and wealth-focused environment has negative side-effects with respect to one's family?

I don't think that suburban ennui is anything new, and equating affluence and education to happiness is short-sighted in my mind.

DanBC3• 11 years ago

Suicide is common. In England suicide is the leading cause of death for men aged 20 to 34, and aged 34 to 49.

For men the rate is about 19 deaths per 100,000 people.

Suicide is less common in youths, which is why this cluster might be a statistically significant cluster. Or maybe it isn't, and it's just natural variation. We need to know the difference so that we can spend money wisely to prevent suicide; that's less likely if we don't understand where to spend the money.

Glyptodon• 11 years ago

"Why are kids killing themselves in utopia? Why are some of the worlds most intelligent, rich, and power adults burying their children?"

Because certain groups of elites that self-select into a neighborhood share a collective social disease that ruins their children.

Possibly they should pay to foster their children into more middle class neighborhoods and schools.

Just because upper-class enclaves exist as goals to lure the beguiled doesn't mean they're actually utopias.

nekitamo• 11 years ago

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?

maratd• 11 years ago

Why are kids killing themselves in utopia? Why are some of the worlds most intelligent, rich, and power adults burying their children?

Really? So you create a hyper-competitive environment where kids are constantly expected to perform and the image of perfection is demanded. In academics, athletics, work, and social life. From kids.

Then you wonder why they off themselves when something falls through? Really?

Maybe try not demanding so much from children and allow them to gradually learn how to handle failure?

Fuck these artificial treadmills being created all over America.

My AP CS class covered topics that weren't even included in my undergraduate CS degree at top ranked UC

This is not something to be proud of. It's sad and depressing. High school is a time for kids to learn social skills, not advanced computer science concepts.

api• 11 years ago

I prefer to call it "fundamentalist positivism" or "determinism" since it is not entirely clear that material behaves like this sort of materialist thinks, and there is abundant evidence that the right hemisphere has a legitimate role in cognition.

Otherwise bravo sir. Hopefully this fundamentalism will go where other fundamentalism before it have gone.

It's sort of obvious what's happening here: over pressure and conformism to prepare kids for high end drone roles in the new global economy. But I have no proof, and of course [citation needed] and all that. Perhaps I am suffering from the Dunning-Kreuger effect. Did I hit every cliche? Dunno... extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

I live near Irvine in SoCal, and I wonder if similar things occur there. It's definitely one of those places where all the kids are expected to be above average and to perform, the schools operate as feeders for top-ten universities, and the parents tend to be a tad on the helicopter side.

I have kids and rent right now. Not sure where we will buy, but it probably won't be Irvine. If my daughter ends up being (gasp!) artistic or just a "laid back" person, I don't want her jumping in front of the LA Metro Rail.

forgottenpass• 11 years ago

Why are kids killing themselves in utopia?

It's not their utopia. It's their parents' utpoia.

quietplatypus• 11 years ago

Exactly. I can't help but feel like the kind of parents who would let their child get to this point, or the peers of such parents, take some perverse pleasure in their children's deaths.

"Is adult entertainment killing our children, or is killing our children entertaining adults?" - Marilyn Manson

Not to mention the peers of the deceased, who probably have a similar sense of schadenfreude. The funny thing is you used to have to draft these kids to go to war to kill em with any efficiency---now you just feed them a line of bullshit (about grades and success or whatever) and they'll kill each other (and themselves) willingly right at home!

ScottBurson2• 11 years ago

If you see this, sonoffett, please drop me a line (email in profile). I would love to chat with you about fundamental materialism.

MichaelCrawford4• 11 years ago

I was a telephone volunteer for the Suicide Prevention Service of Santa Cruz County in the late 1980s.

It is common for suicides to happen in clusters whose numbers cannot be explained by the clustering which does indeed happen in random number distributions.

Having experienced suicidal depression for a number of years, and having attempted it several times, I can speak from experience as to why the clustering occurs: profoundly depressed people find creativity difficult.

Suppose you wanted to kill yourself, were quite desperate to make it all end. But to do so you'd have to obtain the means of your own destruction. That's pretty hard to do, when you can't even get off the couch to make your breakfast.

There are all manner of ways that we could take our lives, but they don't occur to most people. Having a specific mechanism suggested to use - where the "suggestion" is provided by someone who does take their own life - provides us the mental wherewithal to obtain it ourselves.

It is for this reason that groups such as I once volunteered for, advise the press not to name the specific means use, when reporting on suicides.

MichaelCrawford4• 11 years ago

Please permit me to be wildly off-topic but for a moment:

A regard it as obvious by inspection that any truly random sequence of numbers will contain arbitrarily many sequences of any arbitrary sequence of numbers. It is for that reason that I regard one time pads that consist of truly random numbers as insufficiently strong cryptography.

That is, while exceedingly unlikely, the cleartext "attack at dawn" could well encrypt to the ciphertext "attack at dawn".

austenallred• 11 years ago

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.

rralian2• 11 years ago

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.

javert2• 11 years ago

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.

andyl• 11 years ago

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.

petersouth• 11 years ago

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

Cloudy• 11 years ago

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

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

flycaliguy• 11 years ago

Likewise, I believe there are correlations between depression and strong memory skills.

GuiA• 11 years ago

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.

paloaltokid5• 11 years ago

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.

eonw2• 11 years ago

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.

paloaltokid5• 11 years ago

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.

kposehn2• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

kposehn2• 11 years ago

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.

AdreKnowChrome4• 11 years ago

Fiscal accountability and negative reinforcement has always solved spiritual sickness...

eonw2• 11 years ago

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.

sjg0073• 11 years ago

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

swamp40• 11 years ago

For whatever reason, these things come in waves.

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

olivermarks• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

DanBC3• 11 years ago

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

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.

AdreKnowChrome4• 11 years ago

Reposted from : http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/03/25/guest-opinion-...

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

sjg0073• 11 years ago

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.

tonydiv• 11 years ago

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.

DanBC3• 11 years ago

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?

throw_it_away2• 11 years ago

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.

iolothebard2• 11 years ago

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_away2• 11 years ago

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_gottlieb5• 11 years ago

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?

Because people understand their own community's problems, so they at least manage to not fuck it up and make things worse when they try to address those problems.

Like, if you can explain how the rich can and should help the poor in a non-paternalistic way, other than just straight-up fighting poverty and inequality, go ahead. Please. Because it's goddamn hard.

MichaelCrawford4• 11 years ago

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!"

selimthegrim4• 11 years ago

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.

MichaelCrawford4• 11 years ago

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.

WillPostForFood• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

samstave• 11 years ago

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.

cmdrfred2• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

cmdrfred2• 11 years ago

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.

mathattack3• 11 years ago

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.

skier123• 11 years ago

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.

Why Are Palo Alto's Kids Killing Themselves?

Related Stories