Schools Struggle to Teach Lessons in Life and Death

By SONIA NAZARIO

March 10, 1997 12 AM PT

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TIMES URBAN AFFAIRS WRITER

It seems, on the surface, a reasonable response to the nation’s teenage suicide problem: teach schoolchildren that life is better than death.

But this deceptively simple concept has touched off an emotionally raw debate over whether suicide prevention lessons taught in thousands of classrooms--often without parental knowledge--help students or introduce the idea of self-destruction to susceptible young minds.

California’s children spend more class time talking about suicide than in any other state, experts say, and could be the guinea pigs who ultimately determine which side is right.

Proponents of prevention courses contend that they have saved countless children. They say suicide has become a fact of life and must be confronted, whether parents agree or not.

In 1995, according to a survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in 12 high school students attempted suicide. An even larger number--24%--seriously thought about taking their lives. Although fatalities have dropped among high school students in Los Angeles, the CDC survey showed that the city still ranks well above the national average in suicide attempts requiring medical intervention.

During the last school year, teachers and counselors in the Los Angeles district identified as many as 2,000 suicidal children.

Karen Owens, an eighth-grade teacher at Magruder Middle School in Torrance, says she needn’t look beyond her own classroom to see the importance of prevention courses. In a survey of her students, 10% said they were considering ending their lives.

On a recent day, as Owens launches into her lesson, it becomes obvious the students are versed in the topic. When she asks what might prompt someone to take his or her life, several hands shoot into the air.

Matthew St. John says a 13-year-old friend tried to kill himself because “his parents were getting divorced.” Kristen Crofut, 13, sitting in the back, says she became suicidal after watching her father die slowly of lung cancer. At the age of 10, she says, she locked herself in a neighbor’s bathroom and began slicing her left arm with a knife. “I was alone and scared. I thought if I died I’d be with my dad. It’d be better.”

Critics of suicide prevention lessons say such an approach is dangerously broad. A wiser alternative, they say, would be to identify troubled children and get them individual help.

“If one kid has a headache, you don’t give the whole class an aspirin,” says Phyllis Schlafly, president of the Eagle Forum.

Her conservative lobbying group and others say teachers can’t be trusted with the fragile psyches of children. Some teachers, they say, have gone so far as to have students write their own suicide note, eulogy or obituary and to take them on field trips to the local mortuary--all to emphasize the finality of death. Such an immensely personal and sensitive topic as suicide, opponents say, should be handled at home.

That was Pamela and Dennis Angelo’s deeply held belief. Last year, they successfully sued the Antioch Unified School District, which had refused to let their 15-year-old son, Mikel, out of a class that taught suicide prevention. A state court ruled that the family had the right to pull Mikel from the required course. Since then, the district has allowed parents to voluntarily withdraw their children.

“I’m not advocating to stick your head in the sand and pretend this doesn’t exist,” says Dennis Angelo. “But I don’t want teachers who aren’t trained in this to open up a Pandora’s box.”

The opposition’s poster child is a boy from Canton Township, Mich., named Stephen Nalepa.

In 1990, the 8-year-old was shown the film “Nobody’s Useless” in the second grade at Gallimore Elementary. In it, a disabled boy is teased. The boy overhears his father call him “useless.” He tries to hang himself but ultimately is saved. Stephen saw the film on a Friday. On Saturday, he hanged himself with a belt from his loft bed, even though his mother says her gifted son was not depressed.

“You put something like this in front of children,” says Deborah Nalepa, “and they are going to recreate it.”

The Nalepas sued the local school district but lost when the Michigan courts ruled that government employees are immune from most negligence claims, including those filed by the dead boy’s parents.

California in the Forefront

Suicide prevention classes began sweeping the country in the mid-1980s after several clusters of students killed themselves and a federal court ruled that school districts could be held liable if inadequate prevention measures contributed to a death.

In the vanguard was California, where suicides were soaring above the national average, prompting educators and mental health experts to begin instituting pilot classes. Today, 41% of the state’s public school districts have suicide prevention programs. Nationwide, the number is an estimated 15%.

During the typical lesson, which lasts about a week, junior and senior high school teachers tick off suicide statistics, train children to recognize warning signs and urge them to tell an adult if they or a friend are in peril. It’s better to have a mad friend, they’re taught, than a dead one.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, which has seen a sharp decline in suicide deaths, requires between two and eight prevention lessons in seventh and 10th grades during health classes. Elementary schools typically focus on enhancing self-esteem, impulse control and communication skills instead of explicitly talking about suicide.

Many other districts throughout Southern California also have embraced anti-suicide instruction. The Los Angeles County Office of Education is in the process of retooling and expanding its suicide prevention program to five weeks.

In Room 101 of Lincoln Middle School in the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, 29 students get ready to hear life-skills teacher Al Trundle’s passionate pitch. Now in seventh grade, their first anti-suicide instruction came last year with a film about a girl who slit her wrists. Some students say their teachers raised the topic in fifth grade.

On this day, Trundle begins by asking the children to write a letter to an imaginary suicidal friend. “Why do you want to commit suicide?” a thin girl reads aloud from her letter. “Why not wait until you are 100 years old?” Another girl, her blond hair pulled back with a flowered headband, says: “Think about the impact this would have on others.”

When asked what might lead a teen to want to die, students mention depression, a feeling no one cares, losing a family member, divorce. “Sometimes,” one boy with thick glasses says, “there’s just so much pressure.”

The teacher then holds up a magazine cover showing grunge rocker Kurt Cobain and the headline: “Suicide.”

“This,” says Trundle slowly, deliberately, “is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.”

He tells the class about a 10-year-old who shot himself in the head at a Los Angeles school--”a kid two years younger than you.” The boys and girls stir in their plastic molded seats. Some let out a little gasp.

“My concern for this class,” he continues, “is that none of you say suicide makes sense. I consider it a personal victory when I open the paper and don’t see your name in there.”

Next, he tells them what to look for in friends.

“If they say, ‘I want to blow my head off,’ that’s a red flag!” The teacher points a finger at his temple, as though ready to fire. “If they know where a gun is,” he adds, “big red flag!”

Trundle tells them that if a classmate is considering suicide, they should get adult help. “If you are considering it, call one of these people,” he says, unfurling a list of school officials and hotlines. “Talk about what’s going on.”

As the bell rings, Angela Melo, 12, straps on a backpack that nearly overwhelms her and says she thinks the day’s message will stick with Trundle’s students.

“If someone in class was thinking about doing it, I think this probably made them change their mind.”

She wishes she could have had the course three years ago when a friend turned suicidal after her grandfather’s death. “She thought if she died she would join him in heaven.”

Angela, who says she felt helpless back then, vows she’ll summon a counselor if another friend begins talking about death. Scampering to her next class, she says she can’t see the harm in prevention classes. “If they show why you shouldn’t do it, I don’t think it will make someone do it.”

Advocates of suicide education point to data showing that in California, self-inflicted deaths for older teens dropped 39% between 1970 and 1994. At the same time, the U.S. rate nearly doubled. In Los Angeles, one of two cities where the courses were piloted, the teenage suicide rate dropped from nearly triple the national average to 28% below it between 1970 and 1994.

And although suicide attempts requiring medical treatment in Los Angeles remain twice the national average, advocates say the dropping death rate proves that prevention courses are ensuring that students get help before repeated attempts turn lethal.

Says Los Angeles Unified suicide counselor Rosemary Rubin: “We know we are saving kids.”

Different Studies, Different Results

The forces for and against suicide prevention courses draw ammunition from two conflicting studies, both examining what has happened in New Jersey schools.

One was authored by Rutgers University’s John Kalafat, an assistant professor of applied and professional psychology. He found that in Bergen County, which launched intensive anti-suicide lessons in most of its schools in 1987, suicides have been halved during the past decade.

“This disproves that talking to kids about suicide will make them do it,” Kalafat says.

He has also found that the percentage of children willing to seek help for a suicidal friend jumped from 20% to 40% after courses.

The other study was authored in 1990 by Columbia University’s David Shaffer, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics. He concluded that prevention courses erroneously present suicide attempts as a fairly common reaction to intense stresses, not as a deviant act by the mentally ill. The effect of this, he says, is that a child may come to believe that suicide is normal, even acceptable.

Shaffer’s study of prevention classes in six New Jersey high schools found that the attitudes of students who believed suicide was a reasonable solution remained unchanged. His study, unlike others, also showed that students who took the classes were no more likely to seek help for a suicidal friend.

Shaffer says his research shows that the best way to help suicidal students is to identify those at risk so they can be individually counseled--with parental consent and a qualified instructor. “You need a lot of training to do these things in a skilled way,” says Shaffer, who notes that some teachers begin suicide prevention instruction after a single training session.

Although some researchers argue that Shaffer’s sample of students was too small to be meaningful, his findings have been seized upon by conservative groups long critical of the time schools spend on non-academic topics such as sex, drugs and multiculturalism.

Many schools, particularly along the East Coast, where Shaffer’s studies carry more influence, stopped suicide prevention classes.

“We ought to use our schools to learn to read and write. Children get their self-esteem from doing that,” says Sara Divito Hardman, California chairwoman of the Christian Coalition. “If schools were doing what they are designed to do, there wouldn’t be as much suicide.”

Some school districts say there’s just not enough time--nor always the inclination--to expand beyond academics.

“Our philosophy is to spend most of our time on the basic skills,” says Margaret Herron, assistant superintendent of curriculum for the Lowell Joint School District in Whittier. Suicide prevention, she says, “hasn’t been a priority.”

Opponents of the courses question whether California’s decline in teen suicide is linked more to the state’s rising minority population than to anything the schools are doing. Minorities, according to most experts, are less likely to commit suicide because their anger more often is directed toward a society they see as discriminatory--instead of inward at their own perceived failings.

Critics contend, moreover, that asking children to take on the nerve-racking responsibility of spotting signs of potential suicides among peers is too much pressure for them.

Teacher A’lyce Baldarelli thinks much of what passes as suicide prevention in the classroom borders on risky group therapy.

In a study skill class she taught until recently at Chino High School, she says, she refused to do certain exercises. One was called “hot seat.” It required that one student be bombarded with personal questions by classmates. “I didn’t feel I was qualified,” she says, “or that it was good to have the bell ring and say: ‘OK, we’ll pick this up tomorrow.’ ”

She says one boy, whose problems were raised to the surface, began waving a gun over his head on campus and yelling, “I’m not going to make it!”

Particularly under attack by critics of prevention courses are lessons that, to them, seem to cross the line between education and glorification.

During the 1993-94 school year, students at Palm Desert Middle School in the Desert Sands Unified School District were shown the video “Carl.”

Carl is teased and called “pimple-head” and “dirtball” by classmates. The boy, whose mother is dead, is shoved around by the school bullies. Depressed and friendless, Carl listens to graduation speeches. In one, a student says that “from this day on, your life will get better.” Carl ends up as a janitor working for the classmates who abused him. One day, he drops to the ground with his broom, sobbing and pleading, “Help me, God!” Then Carl is shown in silhouette, dangling from a noose as music plays: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. . . .”

A speaker eulogizes Carl: “From this day on he will find a better life.” The narrator tells viewers that the tape isn’t intended to promote suicide: “The message is simple: stop teasing.”

Julie Sullivan demanded to see the video after her sixth-grade son, Michael, came home announcing he was going to see a movie about a hanging the next day. What Sullivan saw, she says, made her go ballistic.

She and local members of the Eagle Forum challenged the video’s use, prompting its discontinuation.

In Calistoga, Cindi Frediani says her daughter, Stephanie, returned in tears one day from her fifth-grade class. “Mom,” she said, “they made me draw my own headstone with my own death date!”

Stephanie told her mother she had refused to follow her teacher’s instructions but relented after being told she could not go to lunch until the assignment was done. She wrote that she would die in 2,000 years.

Furious, Frediani pulled her daughter out of Calistoga Elementary School permanently.

Drama Looks at Self-Esteem Issue

Despite naysayers, schools in many areas such as Long Beach are expanding the amount of time spent on suicide prevention.

At Woodrow Wilson High, there is a mental health trailer near the football field where students can stop in and share suicidal thoughts with counselors. Health classes drill lessons on how to raise self-esteem and cope with stress, bad impulses and anger.

In the center of campus, at the Rainbow Playhouse, an evening performance by the school’s drama students is about to debut. The house is full for “The Girl in the Mirror: A Play about Teenage Suicide.” At the theater entrance, dozens of news stories are displayed about teens who have taken their lives.

Onstage, a 17-year-old girl lies in a hospital bed with an IV drip in her arm. She has taken a bottle of sleeping pills and is in a coma. An angel clad in a black robe takes the girl through her life. Her parents fight, then divorce. Her father moves to London with a second wife and starts a new family. Her mother drinks too much. She loses her best friend over a boy. She is rejected by a London school to which she has applied so she could be close to her father. The angel shows the teenager how her hopelessness is, in part, a matter of interpretation, that she can go on.

“Admit it was a mistake. Have the strength to go back!’ the angel tells the girl, who is still in a coma. “The choice is yours. It always has been yours.”

“Nurse! Get the crash cart!” the doctor yells as the girl’s heart stops. The stage goes black as the medical crew works feverishly to revive her. The audience is left not knowing if the girl lives or dies.

Afterward, outside the theater, cast members kiss each other and accept bouquets from well-wishers.

Sean Brady, 16, who portrays the girl’s boyfriend, says the play has helped him put his own troubles in perspective and weather the ordeal of having a friend who recently slashed her wrists.

Suicide, he says, “is all over the place. You can’t hide it.”

Schools Struggle to Teach Lessons in Life and Death

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