Schools and the Youth Suicide Epidemic
The missed opportunity of schools and mental health services, and an interview with a parent fighting back against youth suicide.
One of my friends is a school board member in western New York. He’s a good person with a pretty firm head on his shoulders, which helps him endure the relentless assault by right-wing activists seeking to save the children from books and critical thinking.1
These activists believe they must shield their/our/all children from the schools, teachers unions, school boards, custodial staff, baristas, car wash attendants and others trying to poison their minds with things like equality, equity, inclusion and other such twaddle2.
Oh, and porn. We must not forget about the porn.
The small-mindedness of these activist groups has led to a real opportunity being wasted to actually save the children or, at the very least, help them. If I were motivated to do anything more than write a weekly newsletter about death and grief, I would start my own activist group and protest school leaders for failing to address the rampant mental health crisis among children.
[I want to be absolutely Waterford crystal clear about one detail: I’m not blaming the people on the front lines; I’m looking at school district decision makers.]
You remember mental health, right? A fringe topic for decades brought to light during the Covid-19 pandemic, as we were sent home into quarantine and prevent disease spread. Suddenly, parents had their kids around them 24/7 and found themselves noticing habits and behaviors once confined to the hallways of their local schools. All of a sudden, our children were in crisis.3
The kicker, of course, is that our children had long been in crisis. My wife teaches in a high school of more than 2,000 students in suburban Syracuse. There are four social workers and one psychologist to serve them; a ratio of about 500 students per social worker. In 2016, the National Association of Social Workers recommended a ratio of 250 students per social worker. My wife’s employer isn’t alone; a 2022 audit by the NYS Comptroller’s Officer showed that 95% of districts failed to meet the ratio4.
School social workers should provide short-term, solutions-based consultations to kids, not act as full-time therapists. A perfect storm of a drought of adolescent therapists, lengthy waiting lists for appointments with providers, and broken healthcare system shifts this task back to the school. Never mind the days when one or two kids are in crisis and their regular caseload is in need.
Mental health was paid a great deal of lip service in the aftermath of the pandemic5. Many schools announced plans to staff up and used federal assistance to do it. But, that money is going to dry up, if it hasn’t already, leaving everyone with the eventual question of “And then what?”
And then what indeed, because individuals ages 10 to 24 account for 15% of all suicides in the United States6. From the period of 2000 through 2021, suicide rates increased 52.1%. Nearly one in 10 high school students reported a suicide attempt in 2020-21.
Schools aren’t daycare centers and we shift way too much on them to meet basic needs of children. And, look, we can have huge philosophical discussions about all the factors — a malfunctioning healthcare system, wealth and income gaps, shrinking social safety nets, systemic racism, etc. — that have brought us to where we are today. But, we’re here and we live in a nation where this is a fucking headline:
I mean, look at this chart:
And this one:
The author of this article for Scientific American offers a list of goals for schools and they make a ton of sense: institute mental health curriculum7; restore playtime, music and art; start school later8; and actually take bullying seriously, are among them. I’m intentionally avoiding his recommendation of respecting identities. I support this idea, but I don’t have the stamina right now to deal with this topic and the feces that streams from the mountaintops when someone mentions it. We’ll get to it one of these days, I promise.
Fairly or unfairly, we rely on schools for a lot of things that parents and society either can’t or won’t provide. We expect schools to feed them, but provide less than $3 per kid to do it. We shit on teachers for teaching content that makes us uncomfortable, but they (along with social workers and counselors) have taken on the mantle of making sure kids have food outside of school and clothing to wear. Schools do what they can with inadequate funding, but I will fight you on the fact that the systematic failure to adequately support the mental health needs of students falls directly on the leaders of those institutions.
If the support was there, maybe, just maybe, we wouldn’t be meeting this week’s guests.
Dirt Nap Q&A: Josh & Michelle Anderson
On February 13, 2016, JJ Anderson of Elk Grove, Calif. took his own life.
He was 12 years old.
His parents, Josh and Michelle, saw no warning signs. He was a pretty typical kid, involved with school activities and youth sports and he was a straight-A student.
In the wake of his death, his parents took action. Feeling as if there is a lack of conversation about suicide in middle schools, they founded JJ’s Hello Foundation to provide education and resources to schools and parents with the hope of preventing youth suicide. Josh and Michelle have since received their Mental Health First Aid certifications and are AFSP field advocates and survivor loss facilitators.
Josh was kind enough to answer a few questions about JJ and the foundation’s work.
***
You’ve become suicide educators and created the JJ’s Hello Foundation in his memory. How has this helped you process the grief of your son’s passing?
Every day is difficult, but being able to help others in JJ's name makes things just a little bit easier. When we are able to talk about our son, it helps keep his memory alive both in our minds and the minds of others. If we can save one life from taking theirs then we have done what we set out to do when we started the foundation.
Speaking of grief, can you talk about how grief is different when the death is by suicide? Has your grief subsided over the years since his passing?
A suicide death’s grief is different because of two reasons. One, the death is sudden, usually without warning. Two, the death was the choice of the person who is gone, which leaves the people left behind with a lot of questions and little answers; things like “why wasn't I enough” or “why didn’t they talk to me?”
You’ve experienced this firsthand and again, I’m truly sorry that you have. Can I ask what happened that day? How did you learn of JJ’s passing and what played out in your head as you reconciled your thoughts around it?
That day JJ came home upset from school, I had just gotten off from work. He came in through the garage and I heard him slam his bike down on the ground. I asked him what was wrong, and he said he didn’t want to talk about it and laid down on the couch. Our older son had a freshman baseball meeting that night, so I told him I loved him, got his little brother — who was 6 months old at the time — and met his mom/my wife outside when she pulled up from work.
We were at the meeting for about an hour and we decided to stop at WingStop for food to bring home. While we were waiting for the food, our older son got a text from one of JJ's friends asking if he was with him. He asked why, and she said because he said he is going to kill himself. We tried to get a hold of him on his phone and got nothing. We called our home, where my mother/his grandmother and our daughter were. My mom sent our daughter up to knock on his bedroom door and their was no answer.
We raced home and my wife and I ran upstairs and started banging on the door. My wife told me to break it down and, when I did, we watched his body fall to the ground. He had taken his life with a video game cord. My wife did CPR — she is a nurse’s assistant — while we waited for the paramedics. When they got there, they were able to get his heart beating again. He was at the Kaiser Roseville PICU for three days before they declared him brain dead. In the end, he was able to donate three organs and save two other lives.
If we can save one life from taking theirs then we have done what we set out to do when we started the foundation.
I read an article where Michelle said there was no warning from JJ that he might take his life. How do you relate to other parents that there might not be an outward sign that their child is considering suicide?
Kids these days often tell a friend or peer how they are feeling before ever reaching out to their parents or another adult. As parents, we need to have open conversations weekly or daily about how are kids are feeling and what is going on in their lives. We have created a parents’ journal that is for sale on our website that helps in these conversations and noticing changes in our teens.
We’ve seen a marked increase in suicide among teens and adolescents since the COVID-19 pandemic. If any good has come of the pandemic, it’s that mental health issues among this age group are being taken seriously, but it seems like we don’t have the infrastructure or person-power to reach all of the kids in need. Am I characterizing the situation correctly?
Your correct, as a country we are in dire need of additional funding in both counselors and psychiatrists. The epidemic levels of suicide ideality within our kids is only going to get worse. It is up to all of us to ensure our kids have an outlet for their emotional distress and have people that they can go to to talk about what they are going through and ways to help.
What does JJ’s Hello Foundation do to support teens in your area? What programs does it provide to families facing the very real challenges of the world around them?
JJ's Hello Foundation helps in the community in multiple ways. My wife and I go to schools, churches and other community events and talk to attendees about our sons story and ways to help their families. We also have an award that we present each year to deserving students at the middle school he attended before he died.
Our youth mental health kits are created with donations our foundation receives and are provided free of charge to local schools and as far away as New York. We also have the Can You Hear Me cards which we have handed out over 10,000 of these cards free to the community in the last seven years. Recently, we have created a teen journal and a parents journal to assist with their mental health. The journals are available to purchase, but everything else we do in the community is free of charge.
Can you talk about the stigma surrounding suicide among our youth?
There's always been a cloud that has hung over the topic, but I feel like teens, kids and suicide are something that people really don't want to talk about. There is, and always will be, a stigma surrounding mental health; you are weak or crazy or your going to get thrown into a hospital.
The fact is so many of us suffer from a mental health related issue, such as anxiety or depression, and if we have open conversations about it we can make mental health as regular to talk about as cancer. Also, you would be surprised how much kids do talk about suicide and know about it. The problem is they don’t have the right information and that creates a whole other issue.
I’ve noticed that, in my daughter’s age group, kids are telling one another to kill themselves just as we would have told someone to go fuck off when we were teens. I’m serious when I write this. I actually read a text message where one of them told another person they were fighting with “You should just go kill yourself.” What am I missing here? Generally speaking, is this simply an issue of maturity or do we need to look deeper into how kids are treating one another?
Our daughter also was told by a peer to kill herself. At least for us, because of the loss of her brother, she was able to come to us and tell us and we were able to get her help and handle the situation. The simple fact is kids these days follow what they see online and on social media. At one time, it was considered funny to tell someone to go kill themselves. Its the same in our opinion when we see someone put a imaginary gun to there heads. Suicide is not a joke and should be taken extremely seriously. Again, we all have a responsibility to educate ourselves and others so these things don’t continue.
Finally, what is it that I, Jared Paventi, parent of a 13-year-old girl, need to know about suicide among teenagers that can’t just be summed up on a blog post or in a brochure?
The simple fact is depression and suicide among our youth are not going to just go away because we want to choose to ignore it or think “my child wouldn't do that.” Our kids already know what suicide is, they may have even researched a plan and, because of this, it’s up to you and me and everyone to have the open conversations all the time with our kids not just when we see them struggling, but even when they appear to be okay.
These conversations will not only save our kids, but help provide them the tools to possibly help someone else who is struggling by helping them get to a trusted adult and get help.
The National Suicide Helpline is available 24 hours a day by dialing 988.
JJ’s Hello Foundation is based in the Sacramento, CA area.
Final thoughts on finality…
“It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.”
— John Steinbeck
Dirt Nap is the Substack newsletter about death, grief and dying that is written and edited by Jared Paventi. It’s published every Friday morning.
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Look, I’m going to apologize if you weren’t up for social commentary this week. It’s tough for me to talk about things like suicide and mental health without honing in on failed systems, hypocritical crusades and societal entropy.
I do love this word.
It turns out that we also learned that our children were more annoying than we suspected.
For fuck’s sake, 19 school districts didn’t even have a social worker
Just as it is after every mass shooting.
https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/disparities-in-suicide.html
That falls under social and emotional learning and the parent’s groups don’t like that shit either.
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/teens-need-to-start-school-later-no-more-excuses-experts-say/2023/08
A few weeks ago, I was on an advocacy call with state legislators, and mental health services came up (of course). One legislator said he wanted to see every kid in school see a mental health professional whether they "need" it or not. It's a great idea for so many reasons. It takes away the equity of access barrier that so many families have. It normalizes therapy in an important way - instead of seeing a therapist or social worker because you have an "issue" (and then other kids will know it), everyone gets to see one. It normalizes that therapy is for everyone. I love this idea, and want to make it happen. (Of course, check out the governor's budget with regards to schools and get mad all over again).
Of course, on the other side, a parent who represents the people you talk about in your lede who, at a recent BOE meeting, complained about a sign hanging in one of our schools with an anodyne statement like "It's OK to not be OK" as promoting a victim mindset. Sigh.