Teen-Age Tragedy : Local Youths Appear to Mirror Grim National Trend of Rising Suicides

Jean has tried it six times. “I’ve got a lot of experience with suicide,” she says. “Once I tried to OD on these super-strong painkillers. I took six of them and about 20 cramp pills. It didn’t work, though I came real close. All I wanted to do was sleep and sleep and sleep, but they wouldn’t let me. I always try to kill myself over guys.”

The 15-year-old Covina girl talks about her attempted suicide in the flat, routine tones of someone describing a minor traffic accident. But she has this wounded look. Like the two other teen-agers (all of their names have been changed) sitting with her recently in a sunny nook at Sierra Royale Hospital in Azusa, Jean has the preoccupied, detached look of a plane-crash survivor.

Jean is a slicer--one who generally prefers a knife or a razor blade as an instrument--and her wrists reveal a faint, spidery pattern of scars from previous attempts.

“Most of the time I was drunk or on coke or something,” she says. “I’d just start thinking about my life and how it was really going bad.”

They all have suicidal episodes to recount. For Tony, it was a massive dose of an antidepressant, then a razor attack on his own wrists. Alice downed 11 of her mother’s “metabolism” pills. “All I knew was that they’d hurt me,” she says. “By the time they got me to the hospital to pump out my stomach, I was shaking.”

Relentless Pain

They all talk about the pain, the relentless pain, which permeated their lives like a fog. “I just wanted to get out of the pain,” says Tony, 15, a scowling youngster who talks in short bursts.

Teen-age suicide, with its disturbing tendency to repeat itself in deadly chain reactions, has become one of the great conundrums of the 1980s. It has generated books, Ph.D. theses, television shows, magazine articles and large quantities of dinner-table chatter. Everybody seems to have a theory as to why nine out of every 100,000 Americans between the ages of 15 and 19 commit suicide, while countless others try to kill themselves.

But no one has come up with a sure-fire remedy for stopping the episodes of destruction, such as a quadruple suicide two months ago in New Jersey in which four teen-agers asphyxiated themselves in an idling car in a garage.

“It boggles your mind,” said one hospital official from Baldwin Park. “Children are supposed be happy and carefree.”

All the Ingredients

It’s the same worrisome problem in the San Gabriel Valley that it is in the rest of the United States. According to psychiatric and medical authorities in the region, all the ingredients are there, from colossal communication breakdowns in the home and community dislocation to the widespread availability of drugs and firearms. The numbers locally appear to be following the same rising curve as the national trend, which has shown suicides among teen-agers tripling since 1950.

All of the crushing adolescent angst is there, too. “If we have a future, it won’t be much of a future,” said one willowy 13-year-old, recovering at Charter Oak Hospital in Covina after impetuously swallowing 30 capsules of a leading extra-strength pain reliever.

There are no figures available to show exactly how many attempted or successful teen-age suicides occur each year in the San Gabriel Valley. But professionals in local hospitals and school districts contend, at least informally, that the problem of adolescent self-destructiveness is one of major proportions.

“We just see an awful lot of unhappy, despondent teen-agers,” said Pam Eastwood, a clinical social worker who heads a program to intervene with troubled youngsters who show up at the Queen of the Valley Hospital emergency room in West Covina.

Apparent Decline

According to the Los Angeles County coroner, the number of successful teen-age suicides has actually been declining in the county in recent years. In the year ending June 30, 1985, there were 52 successful suicides in the county, compared to 56 the prior year and 71 in the year before that. But suicidologists say coroner’s statistics do not always accurately reflect all the successful suicides, because some are disguised as accidents by sympathetic authorities. Suicidologists say that for every successful suicide there are as many as 200 attempts.

During the first three months of this year, the Queen of the Valley emergency room treated 38 youngsters between the ages of 13 and 19 who had tried to take their lives. “Some were serious; some were not so serious,” said Eastwood. “But I take them all seriously. Even the weakest attempts can end up killing somebody.”

The emergency room at Terrace Plaza Medical Center in Baldwin Park has been treating between three and six teen-agers a month for “definite” suicide attempts, according to David Watkins, public relations coordinator for the hospital.

“And there are another three to five coming in with overdoses of one kind or another,” Watkins said. “They aren’t necessarily suicide attempts, but they could be a preliminary experimental phase.”

The story is much the same in other hospitals, though some emphasize that there has been no noticeable increase recently. “Kids have been doing it for years,” said Dr. Don Thomas, head of Huntington Memorial Hospital’s emergency room.

Last fall, there were a pair of dramatic suicide attempts in the schools. A boy shot himself in the abdomen at Valley Continuation High School in Industry, and a boy downed a large quantity of pills at La Canada High School.

Agencies Prepared

Perhaps because of incidents such as those, schools and social service agencies in the San Gabriel Valley may be a little better prepared to deal with suicidal teen-agers than those in other areas, according to mental health professionals.

“Three or four years ago, a lot of school districts denied they had the problem,” said Dr. James Skalicky, a therapist and mental health educator with Sierra Royale Hospital. “Their attitude was, ‘Let’s hide our heads. The problem doesn’t exist.’ But more schools are open to setting up special programs now.”

The Mountain View School District in El Monte, for example, has set up its own suicide prevention program. “Every year, we had four or five kids who either attempted suicide or who seemed to be at risk,” said Arnold Tovar, director of pupil personnel services. “Two years ago, we had a girl who drank a bottle of rubbing alcohol. We took her to the hospital, but we never felt good about the process. We were always kind of afraid that we might react inappropriately to these things or not at all.”

With Skalicky’s assistance, the school district, whose students attend kindergarten through the eighth grade, told teachers and principals how to recognize early warning signals from suicidal students and established procedures for referring despondent students for professional help. The district also set up “postvention” procedures to stop anguished “copycat” attempts in the wake of successful suicides.

Burned to Death

The school used those procedures last year after a 13-year-old student was burned to death when the gasoline he was sniffing for a narcotic high ignited. “Though it wasn’t technically a suicide, the whole school was in an uproar,” said Tovar. The district set up a crisis room in the school to offer counseling for depressed students, it broadcast accurate details of the death to the student body via the public address system and it had a counselor follow the dead youth’s schedule of classes to discuss with all of his classmates exactly what had happened.

“We also used the incident as an opportunity to make a point about the dangers of using drugs,” Tovar said.

The Charter Oak School District in Covina has established similar procedures as well as a working relationship with a nonprofit program called Project INFO, which seeks to improve “family communication skills” through a series of seminars.

“Our feeling was that, with the stresses of society today, more and more families find it difficult to communicate,” said Bonnie Bowman, assistant superintendent for support services. “It’s all on a pedestrian level. ‘Take out the trash. Get ready for bed. Come to the table.’ But there’s often nothing with depth and substance.”

Family Seminars

One evening recently, members of half a dozen families from the district gathered at the Cedar Grove School in Covina for the fifth of seven weekly seminars on overcoming communication blocks. The emphasis here is on the educational rather than the therapeutic, says Project INFO director Irene Churchwarden. “We try to teach people the skills of listening and assertion,” she said.

The subject is anger. Project INFO group leader Jan Bouris draws a big volcano on the blackboard. “Anger is just the top part of the volcano,” she says to a mixed crowd of weary-looking parents and fidgeting children. “It’s the part of the volcano that explodes and spits things out. What’s really important is all the feelings under the anger.”

Then she leads the group through a series of low-key exercises to get them to think about underlying feelings. From the responses of the participants, the exercises appear to be, at times, revelatory, with understanding and relief occasionally dawning on people’s faces. “Families get locked into maintenance talk,” says Churchwarden. “Everybody’s so busy with their own lives, there’s little talk about what’s really going on in their lives.”

What happens when you ignore your anger? Bouris asks.

“You start putting yourself down,” says one woman.

“You stew in your own juices,” says the man next to her.

‘Getting Attention’

Even worse, says Bouris, you can thrust anger so deep into yourself that you don’t know it’s there. “You can push it so far down that you bury it,” she says. But it comes back at you in surprising ways, she adds. “Some teen-agers are very, very angry,” says Bouris. “But instead of recognizing that anger is a feeling that can be dealt with, they sometimes start devising ways of getting attention. Like suicide.”

As elementary as the lessons appear, they are precisely what many families need, mental health experts say. “When a teen-ager tries to commit suicide, he’s basically saying, ‘There’s no one in this world who understands the pain I’m feeling,’ ” said Dr. Greg Sentenn, director of Charter Oak Hospital’s adolescent treatment program. “It gets to the point where the only solution to the pain they’re experiencing appears to be to take their own lives. We try to work with the families to re-establish family ties.”

Suggested causes for the epidemic of teen-age suicides range from an absence of Kennedy-era social purpose to the phenomenon of “adolescent separation individuation,” which Thomas, the director of the Huntington’s emergency room, describes as a kind of teen-age version of the “terrible twos.”

“Kids are once again going through the necessary work of becoming individuals,” he said. “One day they’re terribly dependent; the next, they want their independence. They want the family car because they’re grown up and they have a driver’s license, but they don’t necessarily have the money to pay for gas. It’s tough.”

Losing Touch

But teen-agers who have tried suicide almost invariably talk about losing touch with their families as a motive for self-destruction. “I always had someone to talk to,” said Jean sarcastically. “My mom was always there. But it was always, ‘Wait a minute, the movie’s on,’ or ‘Just a minute, I’m on the phone.’ I came second to everything.”

George, another Sierra Royale patient, talked about his obsession with a friend’s suicide. “I didn’t go to school for three or four weeks,” said the teen-ager, who downed 50 pain relievers a month and a half ago. “He was one of my best friends, and I still carry it around with me.”

The youth said he couldn’t discuss his feeling with family members. “I felt out of place in my family, as if I didn’t belong there,” he said. “I was the black sheep of the family.”

Joy, a patient at Charter Oak Hospital, is a delicate-looking 13-year-old with long blond hair and searching blue eyes. In mid-March, she swallowed a bottle of over-the-counter pain relievers (which, doctors say, are as likely to do permanent liver damage as to immediately snuff out a young life) and went to bed. Fortunately, her younger brother, returning home from school, had forgotten his key. “He woke me up to let him in,” Joy said.

Shortly afterward, her mother arrived and took her to a hospital to have her stomach pumped.

‘Mad at Parents’

Joy is objective about the incident now. “I felt like everybody had abandoned me,” she said, telling her story in a meeting room at the hospital. “I was mad at my parents for moving away from Minnesota, away from all my relatives. This girl at school had turned everybody against me.”

The idea had been to act out an intriguing fantasy. “I just wanted to get out,” she said. “I wanted to stand back and watch everything go by without me.”

She said she had tried to convey her sense of despair to her mother before the incident. “I told my mom what I was thinking about,” she said. “I told her I was so sad. She told me that, well, I’d better not try anything like that.” But the mother never asked what the girl was sad about.

Therapists try to instill in their suicidal adolescent charges the strength to cope with problems that don’t, like those confronted in half-hour television situation comedies, have pat solutions. “We try to show them that life is tough, but they have what it takes to make it,” says Skalicky.

Answers Revealing

The therapy works better for some than for others. Ask the little group at Sierra Royale what they would say to a teen-age friend contemplating suicide, and the answers are varied and revealing.

Jean’s answer sounds suspiciously like a pep talk she’s heard from some counselor during a long career in the mental health pipeline. “I’d say that it’s better to deal with the problem,” she says. “Committing suicide is admitting you’re weak. You have to face up to things. Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.”

But Alice, a bright 16-year-old with a long, rocky history of drug use, speaks from the heart. “I’d probably talk to them a lot about how they were feeling,” she said. “I’d tell them all they’d be doing is hurting their families. I’d tell them that I’d be hurt, because I was their friend. I’d tell them I loved them.”

Alice is just about ready to go home, says Skalicky.