“This is a great place to raise children. Except when they die.”
One evening in February of this year, Ritu Sachdeva and Kate Kuizon both died, both likely suicides. One was found at home, one in a wooded area. Both were 17 and good students at Plano East Senior High, “smart, beautiful and nice,” as CNN described them. Their pictures on Facebook show girls with long glossy hair, hugging friends and smiling. Almost immediately, police began to circulate concerns that there was a suicide “pact” of some sort, which is the kind of news that makes people anxious and fearful. Students shared rumors that it was a love triangle gone awry.
At forums held for students and parents, people voiced their concerns about high school stress and a commitment to achievement, something for which Plano, Texas, where the two girls went to high school, is quite known. Others speculated that it was bullying, social media, or too much internet. A parent was appalled that kindergarten children were experiencing depression. In fact, young children do experience depression, particularly when they are exposed to violence and poverty. The average income in Plano is $80,000—that’s nearly twice the average American income. The people of Plano don’t think that’s the problem, and that’s why they couldn’t believe this could be happening. Again.
Everyone is always looking for an answer to the problem of teenagers– why do they gossip, why do they fight? Is it about boys or girls or status? Is it about the imposed perfectionism? They are so beautiful, so “smart and nice”: the girls who write notes in your yearbook and dot them with bubbles; the boys who help their moms and mow the lawn and look so “clean.” Where do these teens go when they enter the darkness?
I grew up in Plano and also went to Plano East Senior High, which, then as now, was colossal—a monumental campus with a duck pond, complete with a scenic footbridge, as well as multiple football-fields worth of parking lots. As I drove to school, the buildings seemed to sprout from the pastures around it, and there was the fertile smell of cow poop and engine exhaust. I remember the weeks that centered around football games—as well as the football players who overdosed on heroin—and the cafeteria with the vending machine that sold really big chocolate chip cookies. I can’t say I saw a school counselor once. I don’t think I knew we had them.
The impersonality of the school represents the hopes and dreams of the city, which for all its bourgeois newness, is neither so isolated as to be the country proper nor so urban as to invite the sort of diversity that does actually exist elsewhere in Texas. It’s almost like a town that people invented, which it is since it sprang from nothing, just the plains from which it is named. The people in Plano were all new to one degree or another. I was “new,” even when I had lived and gone to school in Plano for nearly a decade because a friend’s mom told me I spoke “like a Yankee.” In retrospect, I suppose it was a code for not being Protestant enough—the “New York values” effect. Back then, Plano was hovering around 90% white.
Plano was a town for teenagers. Everything about it is a monument to materialism. After all, the main reason Plano even exists at all was Collin Creek Mall, a consumerism capital that sits on Central Expressway and contains all of the typical mall essentials: The Gap, the food court, and a place where you could buy sterling silver pendants to share with your friends. I dreamed about folding clothes at Express and stole my parents’ spare change to buy Orange Julius. Now, Collin Creek Mall is out of date and rundown at the heels. Over time, the new Plano has shifted westward to houses with Gothic-sized entryways that prop up country clubs and polo fields. The new mall has an indoor playground and one of those ceilings where everything seems to glitter.
Plano has always been the site of a teen tragedy story, quite possibly because of its name and because of the utter lack of character. It’s a place with good schools, so people say, and very little else. There was a suicide cluster around 1983-4; then there were a series of heroin overdoses in the late 1990s when I was finally leaving.
As a result, citizens of Plano feel uniquely attacked for their town, their culture, and their schools. You can see this on message boards and articles, bristling at news headlines like the famous Los Angeles Times opening line from 1997: “This is a great place to raise children. Except when they die.”
After this most recent tragedy, the immediate response was predictable: an outpouring of support and prayer, quickly followed by deep anxiety about how these deaths would be reported. It’s almost a protective move, which I suppose makes sense when your nickname was once “Suicide Capital.” Everyone says God has a reason, don’t ask any more questions, it’s something we shouldn’t talk about.
An op-ed in the Dallas Morning News accuses media of “overwrought, sensationalized” stories and bland description of a suburban wasteland. It also asks people not to “romanticize tragedy.” Instead, the writer argues, we should focus on the uniqueness of each incident, the crystallization of factors. People blame the same things they once did, but updated for the modern world: technology rather than the divorced parents or working mothers.
I reached out to one of the dead girl’s friends via Facebook. She looked sweet with long dark hair and was in a special program for science. Her response was swift and immediate.
Speculating and sensationalizing teenage suicide is disrespectful, bad journalism. At the end of the day, all of us have lost a friend and an amazing person. It’s hard enough without people asking us why.
Stung, and feeling hurt, I retreated. I searched hashtags. #rip
But why can’t we ask why? Doesn’t everyone wonder why? The lurid curiosity of people has some kind of root in the need to see eternal darkness and face it for what it is. Most of my friends no longer live in Plano, and on Facebook we digitally remembered what it was like being in school there. My friend knew a boy who had OD’ed on heroin. I knew someone who supposedly died huffing, but I never knew for sure. We aren’t supposed to know because we might get ideas.
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The fear of contagion is a real concern, and people who are experts in suicides say that you aren’t supposed to give details—not methods, notes, or even teddy bears on the side of the road. The Werther Effect, coined by sociologist David Phillips in 1974, posits that suicidal ideation travels across social groups, even to people who don’t know each other. Teenagers and young adults appear to be particularly vulnerable. “Teen-agers are highly imitative, influenced by fads and fashions in general,” Phillips told The New York Times in 1987. Phillips’s main example was Marilyn Monroe’s death, which he says inspired nearly 300 “copycat” suicides. A follow-up study in 1990 did find correlation—“clusters” appeared to occur—but the evidence is far from proving causation. The Center for Disease Control describes the importance in implementing plans for “the prevention and containment of suicide clusters,” as if we should put everyone in protective gear. And if you Google search “teenage suicide,” all you see are ways to prevent it.
A major causative factor in spreading the disease is reporting, things just like I thought I would write when I started. On its website the CDC has a page dedicated to “Suicide Contagion and the Reporting of Suicide.” It provides a number of terrifying things to avoid when discussing suicide in order to prevent further spread of the contagion:
Repetitive and ongoing coverage, or prominent coverage, of a suicide tends to promote and maintain a preoccupation with suicide among at-risk persons, especially among persons 15-24 years of age. This preoccupation appears to be associated with suicide contagion. Information presented to the media should include the association between such coverage and the potential for suicide contagion
The CDC also suggests avoiding a discussion of memorials, eliminating “morbid details” and photographs, and avoiding phrases like “she was a great person.” These all, the CDC suggests, lead readers to believe that there is glory and a benefit to suicide.
It was only a few months ago that there were multiple stories on the rise of teenage suicides in Silicon Valley. The causes were quite similar to those in Plano – too much pressure to succeed, alienation, and a high degree of sensitivity that is common in teenagers. The news emphasized that the town is filled with like-minded people, hell-bent on success and monetary prosperity. Jeremy Lin shared his own views about the pressure to have a perfect GPA. In some ways, these incidents—clusters?—seem unique, and in others the same. (After the Palo Alto suicides went public, a CDC team was sent to do an epidemiological assessment.)
Plano was famous for the 1983 suicides, which happened after I began elementary school. They cast a long shadow over the town and became the hidden history of the suburb. Nine teenagers committed suicide that year in Plano alone. They tried to overdose, shot themselves, suffocated themselves. Plano was then one of the fastest-growing cities in America, and my family was part of that growth. We moved there because of my father’s job, which was why most people moved then, it seemed. I remember tracing the states on a map, all the way from the Midwest to Texas, thinking about the lines we would cross. For my parents, a yard and a town where you didn’t have to worry about being mugged were signs of success. When we got there, I lived across the street from steer. I was just a kid in 1983, but I could tell that things were wrong by the tenor of my elementary school teachers’ voices. I had a teacher I loved dearly who left the classroom in tears one day, and I didn’t know why.
For much of my adolescence, I heard that suicide was the ultimate selfish act, the “best revenge.” “They want attention,” I was told about kids who killed themselves. (Another writer called it “short-sighted,” which is a mild way to put it.) Good kids wouldn’t put their parents through this grief. You should be, as ever, “smart and nice,” even in pain. Plano grew smart and nice like alfalfa, blooming along the side of the road, in all of its juicy-skinned glory. To throw that away, well, that was to destroy a gift your parents gave you when they decided you needed a yard and two cars and a whitewashed school. To end your life was to tell your parents, to hell with you and your desire to give me a better life. It was plain ungrateful.
I internalized these messages and never seriously contemplated suicide, or at least would never have said those words out loud. I wanted to be smart and nice as well. Instead I played a game where I asked people what they would say about me if I were dead. I wanted to know, who would still be there for me? I asked my friends this morbid question and it became something like a game. Who would speak for me? Who would be sad? (Would anyone?)
In some ways it just became the list of other things I didn’t know how to talk about, like when a group of boys in the sophomore geometry class drew a dirty picture of me, and I got detention for crying. Or when jokes flew around about my chemistry teacher’s sex life, and she had a nervous breakdown. I understood things enough to know that I wasn’t supposed to say so.
Plano is, for many people, the sign of upper-middle class striving. Things are bigger—portions of spaghetti, margaritas with too much sugar, and oversized SUVs driving on perfectly paved six-lane avenues. Schools are competitive; kids are trained like Olympic athletes to win academic awards. It was also a place of strict conformity. I didn’t really recognize that as a teenager since I was self-centered in the way most kids are. But, it wasn’t a town where people could be anything other than straight, Baptist, blonde, and a cheerleader or athlete. The town was dominated by two families who owned the bulk of the town—the Haggards and the Harringtons. I lived across the street from “Haggard Ranch,” and went to Harrington Elementary School with a Haggard girl who gave me a Christmas card with someone else’s name crossed off the front. “I felt sorry for you,” she said. “And, besides, I don’t like that other girl any more.” Reader, I kept that card for a long time. I found that I couldn’t throw it out.
Underneath this sunny, highlighted exterior, though, it was very dark. Kids went to field parties where they drank and did drugs. The school adopted a “zero tolerance” policy, so anyone who did drugs was kicked out of all extracurriculars. (Leaving them, I suppose, with more free time?) And all that time, the problem was that we weren’t supposed to talk about it. I was told, quit talking, stop asking questions, just sit down and do the work and pray that nothing bad happens to you or someone you love. But we weren’t supposed to question where it all came from, whether there were other ways of being, whether there was something insidious lying in wait.
Kurt Cobain died while I was in high school; I heard about it on the radio where I listened to all of the top hits. In my creative writing class, a skinny boy who wrote in a beautiful cursive wrote about his suicide and wanting to kill himself. He was promptly escorted away. He disappeared. Another boy I knew just stopped showing up. I heard he did it in the garage of his parent’s house. Were we not supposed to know? Everyone knew. I knew about the girls who had their stomachs pumped; it was almost a rite of passage.
The next year, over a dozen Plano kids had killed themselves with heroin. I remember being told that people who drove fancy cars had heroin. Kids who committed suicide or died from an overdose were bewildering in my eyes. One day they were there—talking in class, banging on lockers, tripping people in the hallway—and the next day they were not. Adults didn’t know how to talk about it. My parents turned the page in the newspaper. Someone gave me a pamphlet so I would know the warning signs.
Now when people write about suicides, there’s a note to call a hotline if you feel depressed. If you look for research, you learn that it is prevalent and one of the top ways young people can die. I know to watch for signs, to listen, to be wary if someone gives away their stuff. But when I tried to find statistics on whether these methods help—how many suicides are prevented—there is nothing. Some psychiatrists think that this phenomena can’t be predicted at all. And if that’s true, then why don’t we talk about it? Does even saying the word make it happen?
Adults are afraid of the power teenagers have to hurt themselves. Teenagers are perfectly fine for marketing purposes and to keep the wheel of capitalism turning. Yet, their feelings and thoughts are invalid, and they are told to look away from things that are painful and to keep their hearts full of light. We worry about the objects of teenager-ness, the phones, the peer pressure, the bullying. Girls are uniquely vulnerable, we are told, sensitive to outside pressures. But what happens when the darkness comes and feels unspeakably unique?
One night when I was still in high school, I drove with a friend to the top of an incomplete highway overpass. In my memory, there were no signs or blockades, and we easily drove to the top of the arch, just as it hit its highest peak over Central Expressway. Then it stopped. There was no more bridge, just nothingness. Barely even a pile of rubble.
We got out of the car, and my friend jokingly dared me to walk to the edge of the overpass. I’m not sure what this friend expected me to do or what kind of friendship we even had. I hated heights, but I wanted to look cool, so I did it. I remember my feet touching the bits of gravel where the road just ended. Below I saw the streaks of headlights crossing north and south. Just like that, I thought. But, I went no further.
Jessica Pishko is a writer in San Francisco. She has written for Rolling Stone, Pacific Standard, and San Francisco Magazine.
