Mystery: Deadly Lessons

The funerals, memorial services, grieving parents, terrified students and hand-wringing teachers have taken a toll on superintendent Mark Klein, a gentle man with a church-ready haircut who engages in clipped, lawyerly conversations. He doesn’t want to talk about the suicides for myriad reasons — personal, administrative, ethical — and that’s understandable.

Instead, he points out Council Rock’s response: The school, like many others, adopted a “Yellow Ribbon” campaign, an in-school suicide awareness program designed to open up lines of communication — in other words, to try and get kids to stop trying to die.

Mental health experts will tell you why teens kill themselves: They get moody, they get lost, they can’t cope with their tiny worlds that are just too cruel. They can’t escape the morass of pain that, however temporary, however insignificant in terms of the long, productive lives they’ll eventually lead, causes them to choose to stop living. Violently. To make a statement. To leave a mark.

Here’s the problem with the Yellow Ribbon campaign.

“Suicide prevention is bullshit,” says Sam Rubenstein, a licensed psychotherapist with a private practice in Doylestown. In the nine years he’s been a therapist, Rubenstein has treated hundreds of teenagers and adults, but he specializes in adolescents. He says many of his patients are Council Rock kids who started seeing him after the deaths there. The students coming to him, he says, are frightening in their lack of grounding in life. He says their lives are so myopic that the consequences of their actions — such as death, presumably — are secondary. “To them,” he says, “suicide is the ultimate expression of a pain they’re feeling. It’s their idea of problem-solving. We now live in a culture where that type of emotional expression is a status symbol.”

Schools trying to prevent teen suicide face a bind: Push too hard, and kids clam up. Don’t look closely enough, and you miss something. When any young person commits suicide, a scary degree of hindsight follows: A forgotten mood swing, a deep conversation quickly glossed over, a change in behavior barely registered, all take on new weight, become if-we’d-only-paid-attention clues. “I ask myself every day,” Big Scott says. “What did I miss?”

Council Rock is doing its best to move on, to recuperate from the pain. But it’s still there, in the faces of the kids — those best and brightest, the popular kids with varsity jackets and plenty of options for prom dates and lots of places to go on Friday nights. Council Rock understands that it may never know why some kids end their lives. It’s a tough, disquieting reality to live with. The suicides, Rubenstein says, have “created something bigger than the school district.”

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