Is the recession driving one town’s ’suicide cluster’?

Students visit a memorial to Sonya Raymakers, a student who committed suicide. Photo by Michael Macor / San Francisco Chronicle

In six months, one Bay Area high school has seen four student suicides in the same manner at the same spot: Each leaped in front of a train at a railroad crossing near campus. One more tried, but his mother intervened.

Because teens are “suggestible and impulsive,” Dr. Mel Blaustein told the Los Angeles Times, they can be especially susceptible to the idea of suicide if the first death is romanticized – with shrines at the site, for example.

Of course, teens – especially those going through the college admissions process – are under an unbelievable amount of stress. But the normal stressors that all teenagers face aren’t the only reason that suicide clusters exist. Denise Pope, a Stanford professor, told the Times: “Stress is part of the component, but we can’t say it’s the cause of everything, the main reason these kids are doing it.”

Though they’re not usually the ones paying the bills, teens aren’t immune from the country’s scary economic climate. One teen from the same high school wrote on a message board created to help the community cope with the suicides “this was the longest week of my life. The day after Sonya died, my dad lost his job. This week has been a reminder of all the residual pain and topped with new incomprehensible pain from losing Will.”

Judith Warner writes in the New York Times that during the Great Depression, children were “iconic” and “change-inspiring” but now they “appear all but forgotten” in our handling of the recession. Ultimately, Warner concludes that by ignoring families in peril, “We are, at the very least, at risk of helping erode children’s most basic sense of security and safety, as well as their hopes for the future.”

It’s hard to say whether the recession is indeed playing a role in the Palo Alto suicides – the community is generally a wealthy one – but I would guess that it is. High school, even in good economic times, is hard enough.