Why Are Palo Alto's Kids Killing Themselves?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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!"

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.