Dealing With Grief : Some Experts Say Establishing Memorials for Young Suicide Victims Is Healthy, but Others Fear It Prompts Imitations

How should a school acknowledge the traumatic loss of two 14-year-old girls who attended class Tuesday morning and had executed a mutual suicide pact by that evening?

One opportunity came during a tear-filled funeral Saturday, when more than 200 grieving students and adults gathered at a Victorville church to bid farewell to Annette Sander.

The teen-ager and her friend, whose family has asked that she not be identified, had composed more than 15 goodby letters to friends during the prior week, to be found later. On Tuesday, they dropped a note into a friend’s locker with a map showing where to find their bodies, and then retreated into the desert, each with a handgun to complete their mission.

School officials are struggling with how to allow Victor Valley High School classmates to mourn their loss--without giving the tragedy such attention that other troubled teen-agers might be tempted to follow suit.

There was, for instance, a suggestion by Annette’s friends to plant a tree on campus as a memorial. “They wanted to have a memory--not of the suicide, but of the girls,” said Annette’s father, Tom Sander. “The thought was that my daughter would live on and on.”

But that notion was rejected by school district officials after consulting with suicide prevention specialists.

“It’s important not to glamorize the way they died and how we observe it,” said Ron Powell, assistant superintendent of student services for the Victor Valley Union School District.

“We want to provide a means for friends to say goodby in a dignified manner, but we don’t want to do anything to elevate this to a level of ceremony that would cause others to think, ‘Wow, this is a great way to get the attention I need.’ ”

The reason the girls ended their lives remains unclear. Two suicide notes, each signed by both girls, essentially said, “Don’t forget us, we won’t forget you, and we just couldn’t handle life anymore,” according to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department.

Educators and mental health professionals disagree about whether teen-age suicide victims should be memorialized.

Dr. David Shaffer, an expert on teen-age suicides and a psychiatrist at New York’s Columbia University, suggests that campus memorials are an appropriate response to student suicides--especially if it is shown that the suicide was a manifestation of a mental illness. Such is the case 90% of the time, he said.

“If we can feel sorry, plant a tree and pay our respects for a child who died of leukemia, why can’t we do the same thing for a child who died of depression?” he asked.

There is a risk of greater emotional harm to classmates, he warned, if the girls’ deaths are glossed over and not remembered for the lessons that might be learned by others.

The fear that teen-age suicides might prompt similar acts among peers is widespread among psychologists and other professionals who deal with youths at risk. Some students believe they can win attention in death that cannot be achieved in life, experts say.

“A child may think, ‘I’ll never be the homecoming queen, but at least I can memorialize myself with a tree or be in the yearbook,’ ” said Jodi Brandenberger, a counselor with the San Bernardino County Office of Education, which dispatched crisis intervention counselors to Victor Valley High last week. “And they think they’ll somehow be able to hang around and see it for themselves.”

Psychologist Pamela Cantor, a lecturer at the Harvard Medical School who recently presented a paper on adolescent suicides, argues adamantly that teen suicide victims should not be memorialized.

“It gives the wrong message . . . that someone who should have used more constructive means to deal with their problems, such as therapy, took a destructive means--not only destroying themselves but their families and their circle of friends.

“This is something that we should not memorialize, but pity. We should be grieving these kids, not eulogizing them,” Cantor said.

But Dr. Mark DeAntonio, an adolescence psychiatrist at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, passionately argues that memorials should be erected to prompt ongoing discussion about suicide among other students.

“People like to keep suicide secret because it is so disturbing, but silence doesn’t resolve the issue,” he said. “It just makes the suicide even more mysterious.

“A bench or a tree (dedicated to the student) acknowledges that someone was lost--that we failed to protect an adolescent. And kids deal better with suicide when it’s out there in the open to discuss,” DeAntonio said.

Ira Kruskol, a licensed clinical social worker at Aviva Center, a Los Angeles residential treatment center for adolescent girls, agreed.

“It’s a tragedy that these two kids died, but it should serve as a wake-up call for those kids who are in danger of harming themselves,” he said.

Many experts, and various studies, indicate that the greatest contributor to teen suicide attempts in the wake of a peer’s suicide is the media’s coverage of the tragedy. The media typically do not make note of individual suicides, but coverage becomes more inescapable after multiple-suicide pacts are carried out.

Shaffer said sensational media coverage, not memorials, is more responsible for inducing imitation suicide attempts. Clusters of suicide attempts after self-inflicted deaths of celebrities--such as rock singer Kurt Cobain last year--also are well documented.

The appearance of the media outside Victor Valley High last week was cause of concern to school officials.

“It wasn’t just the local newspapers and TV . . . but now we’re getting calls from ‘Good Morning America’ and ‘NBC Nightly News’ and the ‘Rolanda’ (television talk) show,” Powell said last week.

“It’s reaching a level (of interest) beyond a legitimate, logical standpoint, and now we’re concerned that other kids are seeing that this is getting national attention, and now they can get their names in lights.”

Despite the widespread attention, the local school has worked to focus student attention on the loss of two classmates. In addition to counseling help, Tom Sander met with students to discuss what he knew about his daughter’s suicide and to plead with Annette’s classmates not to follow suit.

Some teachers are letting students use class time to write “goodby” letters to the two girls, said Dave Mallard, the school’s acting principal.

Psychologist Michael Peck, who developed a statewide school curriculum on suicide prevention, suggests that instead of a permanent campus memorial for the victims, a student outreach peer counseling group be established in memory of the girls “to meet with troubled, lonely students.”

The dramatic increase in adolescent suicides--the rate has tripled over the past 30 years, according to the National Center for Health Statistics--is a matter of grave concern to public health officials.

In each of the last three years, 10 to 15 students in the Los Angeles Unified School District--if not more--have committed suicide, said Richard Lieberman, who heads the district’s suicide prevention office.

Still raw in his mind is a 10-year-old boy who shot himself to death in front of 49th Street School last April. Lieberman said he acted quickly to remove the flowers and candles left on the school’s steps.

“We don’t want to memorialize a site and draw the attention of children to his choice of dealing with his despondency by shooting himself,” Lieberman said. “The message has to be clear to other children: This is not an option.

“You want to allow the kids to go through the grieving process . . . but the administrators’ role is to get things back to routine as soon as possible,” he said. A memorial in perpetuity counters that effort, he added.

In Victorville, friends of the two victims have erected their own shrine--with crosses, flowers and cards--in the desert where the girls killed themselves.