Rise in suicides pushes some schools to reopen
Nevada school district raises alarm after 18 students take their own lives
The reminders of pandemic-driven suffering among students in Clark County, Nev., have come in droves.
Since schools shut their doors in March, an early warning system that monitors students’ mental health episodes has sent more than 3,100 alerts to district officials, raising alarms about suicidal thoughts, possible self-harm or cries for care. By December, 18 students had taken their own lives.
The spate of student suicides in and around Las Vegas, Nev., has pushed the Clark County district, the nation’s fifth largest, toward bringing students back as quickly as possible. This month, the school board gave the green light to phase in the return of some elementary school grades and groups of struggling students even as greater Las Vegas continues to post huge numbers of coronavirus cases and deaths The risk of student suicides has quietly stirred many district leaders, leading some, like the state superintendent in Arizona, to cite that fear in public pleas to help mitigate the virus’s spread.
In Clark County, it forced the superintendent’s hand.
“When we started to see the uptick in children taking their lives, we knew it wasn’t just the COVID numbers we need to look at anymore,” said Jesus Jara, Clark County superintendent. “We have to find a way to put our hands on our kids, to see them, to look at them. They’ve got to start seeing some movement, some hope.”
Adolescent suicide during the pandemic cannot conclusively be linked to school closures; national data on suicides in 2020 have yet to be compiled. A study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed an increase in the percentage of youth emergency room visits for mental health reasons during the pandemic. The actual number of those visits fell, although researchers noted that many people were avoiding hospitals that were dealing with the crush of coronavirus patients. And a compilation of emergency calls in more than 40 states among all age groups showed increased numbers related to mental health.
Even in normal circumstances, suicides are impulsive, unpredictable and difficult to ascribe to specific causes. The pandemic has created conditions unlike anything mental health professionals have seen before, making causation more difficult to determine.
But Greta Massetti, who studies the effects of violence and trauma on children at the CDC, said there was “definitely reason to be concerned because it makes conceptual sense.” Millions of children had relied on schools for mental health services that have now been restricted, she noted.
In Clark County, 18 suicides over nine months of closure is double the nine the district had the entire previous year, Jara said. One student left a note saying he had nothing to look forward to. The youngest student he has lost to suicide was 9.
“I feel responsible,” Jara said. “They’re all my kids.”
Over the summer, as then-President Donald Trump was trying to strong-arm schools into reopening, Dr. Robert Redfield, then the CDC director, warned that a rise in adolescent suicides would be one of the “substantial public health negative consequences” of school closings.
Mental health groups and researchers released reports and resources to help schools, which provide counseling and other intervention services, reach students virtually. Mental health advocacy groups warned that the student demographics at the most risk for mental health declines before the pandemic — such as Black and LGBTQ students — were among those most marginalized by the school closures.
But given the politically charged atmosphere this past summer, many of those warnings were dismissed as scare tactics. Parents of students who have taken their lives say connecting suicide to school closings became almost taboo.
A video that Brad Hunstable made in April, two days after he buried his 12-year-old son, Hayden, in their hometown, Aledo, Texas, went viral after he proclaimed, “My son died from the coronavirus.” But, he added, “not in the way you think.”
In a recent interview, Hunstable spoke of the challenges his son faced during the lockdown — he missed friends and football, and had become consumed by the video game Fortnite. He hanged himself four days before his 13th birthday.
Hayden’s story is the subject of a short documentary, Almost 13, Hunstable’s video has more than 86,000 views on YouTube, and an organization created in his son’s name has drawn attention from parents across the country, clearly striking a chord.
“I wasn’t trying to make a political statement,” Hunstable said. “I was trying to help save lives.”
This fall, when most school districts decided not to reopen, more parents began to speak out. The parents of a 14-year-old boy in Maryland who killed himself in October described how their son “gave up” after his district decided not to return in the fall. In December, an 11-year-old boy in Sacramento shot himself during his Zoom class. Weeks later, the father of a teenager in Maine attributed his son’s suicide to the isolation of the pandemic.
“We knew he was upset because he was no longer able to participate in his school activities, football,” Jay Smith told a local television station. “We never guessed it was this bad.”
President Joe Biden has laid out a robust plan to speed vaccinations, expand coronavirus testing and spend billions of dollars to help districts reopen most of their schools in his first 100 days in office.
By then, children in districts like Clark County, with more than 300,000 students, will have been out of school for more than a year.
“Every day, it feels like we have run out of time,” Jara said.