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There Is No Vaccine for Teenage Despair

Being shut in has a way of bringing out our dark thoughts. But it’s also a chance for honest conversation.

Credit...Charlotte Ager

Tali Rosen is a junior at Beacon High School in New York City.

I recently read a heartbreaking story about a 15-year-old girl named Jo’Vianni Smith, who hanged herself in her bedroom in Stockton, Calif., “likely over stress from coronavirus lockdown,” as the story put it. She left no note, and as with any suicide there are questions that may never be answered. But by all accounts Jo, as she was known, was a talented athlete and a musician who seemed her bubbly self even in the weeks before she took her own life.

As a 17-year-old girl, I can tell you that lively exteriors are not always a true reflection of our inner lives. And unfortunately, you don’t need a pandemic or a lockdown to explain teen suicide, which is one of the leading causes of death among teenagers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported that the suicide rate for people between the ages of 10 and 24 has increased 56 percent between 2007 and 2017. In 2017, more than 6,200 young people took their own lives.

Statistics can be hard to connect to, so let me tell you about one of them.

Three years ago, on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, I learned that a friend had died mysteriously in her sleep. This was inconceivable. She was healthy, vibrant and one month away from turning 13. We had met the previous summer at camp in Colorado. She had an infectious laugh and long blond hair and slept in the top bunk next to mine. I will always remember her jumping up and swinging from one of the slanting metal poles that held up our tent, laughing my head off.

Six months after she died, I learned that my friend hadn’t died mysteriously. She had swallowed a handful of her father’s antidepressants, which she had found in the medicine cabinet. She took 10 times his usual dose, and throwing them up did not rid her body of the drug.

She told her parents right away that she had vomited, but didn’t mention the pills, which her parents learned about only after an autopsy. Her father, with enormous courage, published an article telling his daughter’s story and urging parents to keep their medication in a locked box. As he put it, “A little foreknowledge, plus about $50, and my daughter would have lived to see 13.”

Jo’Vianni’s mother, like my friend’s dad, is doing the same thing: bravely telling her daughter’s story in the hope of helping other families avoid the same tragedy. She knew her daughter was feeling the stress of quarantine, but it seemed unthinkable to her that Jo, normally so cheerful, would take her own life. As she told a local radio station, “We may need to stop and worry about the kids that we don’t think we need to worry about.”

As terrifying as Covid-19 is, we are confident we will find a vaccine for it. But there is no antibody or vaccine for the epidemic that took my friend and Jo’Vianni and a growing number of people our age.

After three years of revisiting my friend’s death, I still can’t tell you what was going on in her head. I don’t know if she was so sad in that moment that she couldn’t imagine ever being happy, or if she impulsively did something she didn’t fully understand. One thing her dad wrote was: “Her brain was a teenager’s brain. Despite abundant cleverness, she lacked an adult’s grasp of consequences.”

There were many people weeping at my friend’s funeral who had known her their whole lives. I spent all of two weeks sharing a tent with her — so short a time that I felt embarrassed by how deeply I felt her loss. Part of my sadness was questioning the validity of my grief. Camp friends bond fast, and we had stayed in touch despite living in different states. But her death loomed so large for me for other reasons as well.

The biggest was that I felt it could have been me.

That summer, I spent only two weeks at camp instead of the four I was supposed to because I’d gotten a concussion and come home early. The enforced isolation that followed — the time spent trapped in my room with my own thoughts, not seeing my friends who were my support system — led me to a dark place. It made me wonder what I was capable of doing. I’d gotten my concussion on a four-day rafting-biking trip; I’d lost my glasses on the rafting part, but decided to bike anyway. I knew I couldn’t see, I knew I shouldn’t go, but for some reason I did, and though I wasn’t trying to harm myself, part of me wanted something to happen. I’m lucky all I got was a concussion.

As a result of that summer in isolation, and the scary thoughts I was forced to confront, I started talking to my parents about what was going on in my head and started a treatment called dialectical behavioral therapy that my parents participated in. It was especially good at helping me learn how to live with problems that couldn’t be solved. By the time I learned about my friend’s suicide, I’d completed a six-month course and had learned a lot more about my own brain. But she became the consequence that I had not been able to imagine for myself. I saw it, I felt it, I watched her family feel it, and I understood the reality of what it means.

When my parents read the article by my friend’s father, they went online and ordered a lock box immediately. Everyone reading this should do that too, no matter how happy your children seem. They may not even know themselves what they are feeling, or that they need help or what impulses they are capable of acting on.

She was the first person who came to see me in the tent where I was lying with my concussion. She raced to find my cousin, Ella, who also went to the camp, and the two of them ran over to cheer me up. I would give anything to have been able to do that for her when she was alone and terrified in the night. Instead of calling for her parents, she posted an obscure message on her Instagram for friends that they saw the next morning, if they saw it at all.

I think about Jo’Vianni, who lived in California, and I think about my friend, who lived on the other side of the country, and I think about all the kids in between. There is no antibody test for sadness or fear or dark thoughts. Being shut in has a unique way of bringing them out. But being shut in with family can also be a chance for honest conversation.

And we need to take that chance. Some things need to be locked up, but other things have to be shared.

Tali Rosen is a junior at Beacon High School in New York City.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources

What are your questions about the post-coronavirus future?

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