Down in the Hole

Like many, if not most, of the people who work in non-profits, I wear many hats, not the least of which is managing our social media outreach through this blog, Facebook, Twitter and now Pinterest.

All of the so-called social media experts tell you that content is king and if you are not constantly updating your pages, your site is dead and users--"eyeballs"--are lost. 

We are dependent on the kindness of strangers to support our work.  And in an increasingly competitive environment where dollars are few and getting fewer, being seen to be current, up-to-date on trends and information in your field is key to getting those strangers to affiliate with an organization and support it financially.  So, in between promoting news and events originating with our Agency, I supplement the content for these outlets with posts I find elsewhere on the Internet. 

To make this easier, I have set up Google Alerts to bring me content relating to our programs and so each day I get emails about poverty, mental health, mental illness and suicide.

Every day.

And, by far, the leader in content generation terms is suicide.  Especially teen suicide.  8-9-10 posts every day.

To be honest, some of these posts are multiple sources reporting on the same event, but it does create the impression that teens are an endangered species in this country.

And it also creates the impression that our most experienced teens, the adults, have somehow managed to completely blot out that experience and therefore have no connection nor understanding of what teens go through.

The parental "survivors" of completed suicides--those who have lost a child--are always portrayed in shock, always seen as searching for the big why that took their child.

At the meta level, the narratives all begin to read the same; as though they conform to a predictable movie-of-the-week scenario where only the names have been changed.

In addition to the stories about completed suicides and searching parents, I also read about prevention efforts: efforts intended to educate students, parents, teachers, community leaders, clergy about the signs and symptoms of suicide.  The notion here is that if we know what behavior patterns to look for we can intervene and connect those at risk with resources and treatment.

I can only imagine that this makes the survivor parents feel that much worse.  The implicit suggestion is that it was some sort of deficit of vigilance that claimed their child.

Another common prevention strategy is one of affirmation.  Reminding at-risk teens that they are valued and loved will keep them from seeking a permanent end to a temporary problem.  This makes sense in that it enables those participating in these outreach efforts feel as though they are being proactive:  kind of like making cinnamon toast and hot tea for a loved one with a viral infection.

It is not my intent to mock or ridicule or in any way diminish the experience of those who have lost a loved one, or who are involved in suicide prevention efforts.  The losses are devastating and the interventions are few and palliative at best.

Based on my reading, which I freely admit is by no means comprehensive, it seems that ribbons and wrist bands, walk-a-thons and poster campaigns remind us that there is a problem.  Lectures and resource lists are precautionary by definition:  intended to inoculate.  Viral videos, like luxury car commercials, are promises of a possible future:  like personal jet packs and flying cars.

Missing from the conversation, it seems to me is an acknowledgement of the present, the painful now, the nowhere-to-run tense that dominates the landscape and occupies every waking minute. 

To be a teenager is to experience the collision between the eternal optimism of childhood and pessimism of the adult world; to move from a box of 128 Crayolas, through the binary world of black and white, to the endless shades gray--way more than 50, thank you very much--of the adult world.

And, as if navigating that transition were not difficult enough, we must also factor in the shifting allegiances that define the social networks of our young people.  Not only is impulse control hormonally impaired, but you have to factor in a social landscape that shifts faster than do alliances in "The Godfather."

What's the difference between a teen that is depressed and contemplates suicide and one that is depressed and completes a suicide is a question best left to researchers.  I know that when I was in the thick of my journey through those years, I had my share of teen-angst, paint-it-black, "deep" thoughts. 

I remember the fear and the anxiety and the desperation. 

I remember the rage, the desire to escape, to hide, to make it stop.

I remember the lack of control, the helplessness....  The hopelessness.

A lasting reminder of this period is a record collection that is full of soundtracks from escapist movies and the work of singer-songwriters specializing in expressions of sadness and depression.

Late one night, I remember watching a snowy broadcast of the Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder.  He was interviewing James Taylor and Carly Simon--I think it was Tom Snyder.  (Might have been Dick Cavett)  Anyway, they were talking and would occasionally sing songs separately, or together. 

I had never been a big James Taylor fan.  (I was definitely a member of Team Carly.)  But on that broadcast, he sang "The Secret of Life" and I remember being struck by the disconnect between what he was saying, "The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time," and my experience which was definitely not enjoyable.

At that point in my Teen Trek, time was my enemy:  it could not pass fast enough and take me from my tormentors and to my personal jet pack world of the future.  People actually enjoyed time, appreciated it?  This was inaccessible to me.

But I was, as we say "time-curious" and decided to experiment.

I don't deny it, I dabbled in James Taylor records and tried to make sense of his perspective.  Drawn in by his optimistic "Secret of Life" I was blinded to the darker themes of "Fire and Rain" and had to have their mental health images pointed out to me.

I won't bore you with the rest of my journey, but a definite turning point of my teen years, was discovering Steve Martin.  His excellent book, "Born Standing Up" describes the thoughtful philosophical basis for his comedy, but I was absolutely taken by the absurdist quality of it.  His stand-up comic persona seemed to be defined by this "enjoying the passage of time" idea.  The pure joy that he projected when suddenly overcome by "happy feet" was admittedly a foreign language to me, but I knew it was a country that I wanted to visit.



Like most things in this life, there is no one answer to any question and, where emotions are involved, no one-size-fits-all strategies.  To impact teens who are at risk, who are drowning in conflict and hormones and weighed down by the secrets that are the common currency of those years we, the survivors, need to revisit our own experience and communicate with compassion and with honesty.

I am reminded of this wonderful scene from "The West Wing": 



You know how everyone says "Don't be that guy"?  We have all been that guy and now, when it comes to reaching out to teens who are at risk, we can all have a chance to be that friend who knows the way out.

--Graham Campbell
Associate Director