Board Plans Prevention Program : Schools Struggling to Cope With Suicide

In an effort to prevent the 30 to 40 suicides committed each year by Los Angeles school district students, the school board voted unanimously Monday to develop a program that will alert junior and senior high school students to the warning signs of suicide and help a school cope with the tragedy when it occurs.

Those grim statistics, taken from a PTA study conducted in 1979, were underscored by a recent suicide in the district’s Southeast Region. According to a school official, the student body president at Bell High School killed herself during the Christmas break, a tragic occurrence that has left students and teachers in grief.

Harbor-area board member John Greenwood, who authored the resolution, told the board that 300 to 400 teen-agers in Los Angeles County commit suicide each year. Nationally, studies show that the teen-age suicide rate has tripled over the last 20 years--from four suicide deaths per 100,000 students in 1963 to 12 deaths per 100,000 students in 1983. Experts say that for every teen-age suicide, there are 50 to 100 attempts.

Curriculum Proposal

Greenwood’s proposal calls for developing and implementing a curriculum that will educate adolescents about the common danger signs of suicide and make them aware of school and community resources available to counsel a person contemplating the act.

“It seems that it is students who are the ones aware of when another student is contemplating suicide,” Greenwood said. But, he said, teen-agers rarely turn to adults for help, often because the friend threatening to take his own life has sworn them to secrecy or because they fail to take the threats seriously.

Greenwood said two suicides occurred in San Pedro schools last year. One student attended San Pedro High School; the other was a student at Dodson Junior High School.

“I talked to students later who said, ‘If I had only known he or she was serious about it.’ They did not know the signs,” Greenwood said.

Greenwood said he would like every junior and senior high campus to have a trained crisis team that can help a school deal with the aftermath of a suicide, as well as intervene in situations that might lead a student to attempt it.

Gets High Priority

Barbara Price of the district’s psychological services division will develop the plan. She said the board is giving the program a high priority, but she was unable to estimate when it might be completed.

So far, Price said, the district’s efforts have been “piecemeal.” Three district high schools already are participating in a state-funded pilot program to establish suicide prevention programs in secondary schools. And some schools have developed and trained crisis teams, which are usually composed of an administrator, the school nurse, a counselor and the school psychologist.

Bell High School has such a team that has been working very hard to help the school deal with the loss of its student body president, Principal Mary Ann Sesma said. The school is also receiving assistance from a special team of eight school psychologists provided by the district’s senior high school division.

When school resumed Jan. 2, the school and district teams identified the students who were closest to the victim and invited them to participate in group counseling sessions. Sesma said she and several teachers have individually counseled students who were troubled by the suicide and asked for guidance.

“The reaction of the school was amazement and profound concern,” said Sesma, who asked that the student not be identified. The suicide has evoked “a lot of self-doubt that has to be combatted. Students are expressing concerns for themselves . . . and their ability to cope in society, what hope exists for them. They’re worried young people.”

‘Lost Their Own Child’

The special counselors also have offered help to teachers who knew the student well. “For many,” Sesma said, “it’s as though they had lost their own child.”

According to Dorothy Gram, a San Pedro High psychologist who recently helped her school cope with a student suicide, a crisis team can be instrumental in helping students deal with the deeply disturbing feelings it may stir.

“Many students have difficulty keeping their mind on classes because of a suicide. Their grieving really incapacitates them for a time,” Gram said. “They have great feelings of guilt, thinking perhaps there was something they could have done (to prevent it). Suicide is probably one of the saddest kinds of death and the hardest to finish grieving over because it causes a continual self-examination.”

Many junior and senior high schools do not have specially trained teams, however. Even in schools that do have them, Price said, staffs generally turn to the school psychologist for guidance when a suicide occurs.

But school psychologists are paid with federal funds earmarked for special-education services and consequently spend most of their time evaluating students with unusual needs, primarily the gifted and educationally handicapped. In order for school psychologists to spend more time in crisis management and counseling, they would have to be paid by a different source, perhaps district funds, and receive additional support services, Price said.

On their time, Gram and Banning High School psychologist Bonnie Burka developed a suicide prevention program last year in response to an alarming number of students who seemed to be considering the act.

Common Danger Signals

They visit 10th-grade classrooms and teach students how to recognize 12 common danger signals, such as suicide threats, sudden personality changes or preoccupation with death.

Gram said she receives one referral a week about a student threatening to commit suicide. Some weeks, she said, she handles five or six referrals.

“Whenever I go into a classroom,” Gram said, “I am amazed at how many students say they know someone who is thinking about suicide. They’ll say so-and-so is in the hall talking about killing herself, and they don’t know what to do about it.” When she hears of a youth who is so distraught, Gram provides counseling “to bring them through the crisis period, so he or she doesn’t impulsively go through with” the act.

“I feel our program has saved lives,” she said.

Bell High School Principal Sesma said she hopes the district will develop materials that will help teachers who may be uncomfortable leading a classroom discussion about suicide.

According to Michael Peck, a Los Angeles clinical psychologist who is directing the state-funded pilot program in Southern California, course materials dealing with suicide have been drafted and are being tested this week at Dorsey High School.

Other Schools in Program

Other schools that have or will participate in the pilot project include Van Nuys and North Hollywood high schools in the Los Angeles school district, Warren High School in Downey, Palos Verdes High School in Palos Verdes Estates and Beverly Hills High School.

Peck, who also serves as a consultant to the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center, said that one-third of high school students at one time or another have been told by a friend that he or she is considering suicide. The main point of the curriculum is to stress to students not to act on suicidal feelings because they eventually go away, Peck said.

“We want them to know that no matter how much pain they feel, or how much they want to die, those feelings pass and they will feel normal again and happy to be alive,” he said.

“We also want to help them know what to do if they receive suicidal communications from a friend--how to listen, how to take it seriously and how to serve as a conduit to get that person help at school.”