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August 2017
On November 4, 2014, sixteen-year-old Cameron Lee, a popular, athletic, straightA A at Henry M. Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California, leapt in front of a commuter train. His suicide note provided no clear reason for his act; there were no apparent signs of mental illness, and he was not a bullied misfit. His death followed two other student suicides just three weeks prior, one from the same school and another from a nearby private high. Three months later, another senior at Gunn, by then known to local students as "the suicide school," jumped to his death from the roof of his family's home.
Gunn High School is located in one of the wealthiest school districts in the country and has some of the nation's highest test scores. Its students succeed brilliantly in the meritocratic game of standardized tests and college admissions. But the pressure to perform has left them susceptible to feelings of worthlessness. If one can't measure up and make the grade-what then?
Gunn saw a similar cluster of suicides in 2009. In separate incidents, three current students, an incoming freshman, and a recent graduate all jumped in front of the local Caltrain. That year another recent graduate of the school died by hanging himself. Following these suicide clusters, a 2014 survey of Palo Alto high school students revealed that 12 percent of them had very seriously contemplated suicide in the past year. Another recent report summarizing national and state-level surveys of American high school students put this number at 17 percent.
The largest school district in California, Los Angeles Unified, recorded more than five thousand incidents of suicidal behavior or deliberate self-harm (such as cutting) last year. When this district began tracking these issues in the 2010-2011 school year, there were only 255 incidents. Angus Deaton, a Princeton economist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the intricacies of measuring human well-being, has been following what is now a national epidemic of suicide and depression. In a recent study, he found that since 1999 there has been an alarming national increase in deaths from drugs, alcohol abuse, and suicide-a trend that is especially pronounced among white Americans born since 1975. Deaton calls these "deaths of despair."
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