Survivors, Others Plumb Tragedy of Teen Suicide

As one young panelist on teen-age suicide described it, their stories came directly from the “war zone”--from middle-class, American suburban life.

There was a Sacramento mother who, in a voice that wavered and sometimes broke, described the depths of her loss when last year, for reasons she still cannot comprehend, her 17-year-old son put a rifle to his head. “He was very well-loved--he did not do drugs. . . . I still don’t know why,” said Connie Collins, 46.

Seated to her right, an Irvine teen-ager matter-of-factly related the loneliness, despair and troubled family life that led him, two years ago, to try to hang himself in his bedroom.

Girl, 16, Tried Twice

Next, a petite 16-year-old from Huntington Beach explained why she, too, had tried to kill herself--twice.

Her deep blond bangs covered wide dark eyes, and she struggled to stop the tears as she remembered. “The way I felt before I did it,” she said softly, “I felt no one could understand.”

All three speakers were survivors of an epidemic that has swept Orange County and the nation: adolescent suicide.

In an emotional hour this week, they faced an audience of 400 teachers, police officers, ministers and mental health workers to recount what living with suicide, or a suicide attempt, was like.

Their appearance was part of an all-day conference at the Irvine Hilton. Entitled “Avoiding the Loss of Youth,” the seminar was sponsored by UC Irvine’s Office of Teacher Education, the Orange County Department of Education and College Hospital of Cerritos and Costa Mesa.

Its purpose was simple, Gil Martinez, assistant superintendent for the county Education Department, explained as the day began: The issue was “what do we do to save young lives?”

In Orange County, as around the nation, suicide is a leading cause of death for people ages 15 to 24. It is listed second, behind car accidents and followed by homicide, accidental poisoning and cancer, according to recent statistics from the county Health Care Agency.

47 Youthful Suicides

Figures for 1987 are not available, but in 1986, according to county figures, 47 people in Orange County ages 15 to 24 committed suicide, a rate of 13.2 suicides per 100,000 population. In 1960, when its population was 720,000, Orange County counted only four such suicides.

In the county and around the nation, the rate of adolescent suicides appears to have hit record highs in the late 1970s and leveled off in the 1980s, but the frequency of these deaths is still alarmingly high, experts said Wednesday.

“I see more and more kids talking about being depressed, becoming withdrawn and isolated--more and more kids talking about taking their life,” said Randy Davis, the Huntington Beach psychologist and College Hospital executive who organized Wednesday’s conference. “Taking one’s life may have plateaued, but I don’t think that talking about it has.”

Los Angeles suicide researcher Norman Farberow agreed. In a 1987 survey that he and Dr. Robert Litman performed for the California Department of Mental Health, 40% of youths 16 to 19 had thought of taking their own lives and 20% of those 12 to 15 had had similar thoughts, he reported.

Added Farberow, a USC clinical professor of psychiatry who also is a co-director of the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center, the same survey showed that 5% of the older youths and 2% of the younger group had tried suicide.

Reporting related research, Dr. Barry Garfinkel, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota School of Medicine, said three of every 100 children he surveyed recently have expressed suicidal thoughts.

And in a typical Minnesota high school of 2,000 students, Garfinkel’s research showed that about 60 students attempt suicide every month. Often they make the attempt in their bedrooms and then “sleep it off without telling anyone,” he said.

For every boy who tries suicide, two or three girls do, Garfinkel said. But boys succeed four times more often than girls.

Learned Symptoms

Parents, teachers and friends can learn to recognize the symptoms of suicidal youngsters, Farberow and other experts said. The signs are a “dangerous triad” of emotions, he said: feelings of worthlessness, helplessness and hopelessness.

Those youngsters may be pushed over the edge by a variety of situations, including:

- Family problems.

- Drug or alcohol abuse.

- Problems at school, including low grades and pressure from parents.

- Depression and feelings that “life is too hard.”

- Problems with friends, including a sense of detachment from peers and a feeling of being loved by no one.

“A lot of kids think in a general way, ‘Wouldn’t it be better to be dead?’ ” Farberow said. “But when they begin to think of a plan--when to do it, how to do it,” they are at a danger level. If they confide those feelings to anyone, it probably will be to a close friend, rather than to a parent or other adult, he said.

Those youths need immediate professional help, said Westwood psychologist Michael Peck, also a director at the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center. Suicide can be averted if teen-agers at risk receive counseling and family and group therapy. Sometimes, medication and hospitalization are called for, he said.

Several of the conference speakers mentioned specific techniques that schools can use to short-circuit “lethal behavior.”

A growing number of schools offer “peer counseling,” in which other teen-agers are trained to help fellow students with emotional problems, according to Alice Healy-Sesno, project manager for Los Angeles County’s Youth Suicide Prevention School Program.

Makeba Jones, 18, a senior at North Hollywood High School, explained to an afternoon workshop why she became a peer counselor.

“Teens will empathize more than sympathize” with a troubled youngster who may not trust an adult, Jones said. She added, however, that she and her fellow peer counselors always work under the guidance of an adult--North Hollywood’s dean of students.

Classroom Discussions

Another method to avert teen suicides, both Peck and Healy-Sesno said, is the establishment of a suicide program in every school.

In Peck’s program--now in place in abbreviated form in the Los Angeles Unified School District--classroom teachers discuss suicide in the classroom. Parents and school administrators are given special training in suicide prevention and how to talk openly with students if a suicide attempt occurs. Finally, Peck said, the entire staff--from custodians and cafeteria workers to the principal--is trained to listen to troubled teen-agers and recognize suicidal behavior.

In addition to noticing suicidal symptoms, Jack Canfield, a conference speaker, urged his audience to try to get at the root cause of adolescent suicide.

Canfield, a member of California’s year-old task force on “Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility,” urged that all schools set up a required course on self-esteem.

That course should cover skills in positive thinking, talking about one’s concerns and how to deal with negative emotions, he said.

“I don’t know of any kid who committed suicide because they had to learn the geometric theorems. . . . They commit suicide because they don’t know how to deal with the stuff that’s (in schools and at home)--how to cope with failure,” Canfield declared.

He added, to applause from the roomful of counselors and educators, “If you think you’re a valuable person, you’re not likely to kill yourself.”

The conference’s two young speakers who had attempted suicide agreed.

“All I want to say is . . . you’ve got to love yourself before other people can love you,” the girl from Huntington Beach had said.

Kelly Heller, the 18-year-old from Irvine, added that preventing adolescent suicide also requires that teachers and parents really listen to their kids--not just talk to them in “textbook language.” Though his mother was a volunteer on a suicide hot line, he could never talk to her about his problems, he said.

But after his suicide attempt, he said, he awakened from his coma in a white-walled hospital room and spent months in counseling, learning to talk to others about his problems, learning to heal.

‘Got to Find Yourself’

Still, “it wasn’t peer pressure from the hospital telling me to get well,” Heller said. “You’ve got to find in yourself, somewhere, (the will) to get well.”

Now if adults or other students cannot accept Heller as he is--as a creative young man and someone who once tried to kill himself--”then (profanity) ‘em,” Heller told the audience. “I’m willing to accept myself, willing to stand alone.”

Since his suicide attempt two years ago, Heller has graduated from high school and taken a year off to work full time. But, he said, he plans to go on to college next year and hopefully, a career in the music business.

The girl from Huntington Beach is still in high school and still working through her most recent suicide attempt--an overdose of pills last November.

Asked if she would ever try to kill herself again, she said she didn’t know. “I just got out of the hospital. . . . I’m not going to tell you no. . . . There’s no way of being totally sure that I won’t just try to off myself again.”

Added Heller: “You take it one day at a time.”

TEEN SUICIDE Leading causes of death for Orange County youths, age 15 to 24

Death rate per Number of deaths Cause of death 100,000 population from 1981-1985 1. Motor vehicle accidents 32.2 607 2. Suicide 12.2 230 3. Accidental poisoning by drugs and other substances 4.2 80 5. Cancer (leukemias and lymphomas) 2.1 39

Suicide rates per 100,000 population among youths, age 15-24

1960 Orange County 4.49 U.S. 5.20 1965 Orange County 11.06 U.S. 6.20 1970 Orange County 15.85 U.S. 8.80 1975 Orange County 12.12 U.S. 11.70 1980 Orange County 8.76 U.S. 12.30 1985 Orange County 13.80 U.S. 12.90 Sources: Orange County Health Care Afency and the National Center for Health Statistics