Professionals, politicians, and media reporters: stop dodging uncomfortable realities on youth tragedies

It’s easier for authorities to stigmatize dead teens, lecture their peers, and blame “social media” than to admit troubling complications.

Decades ago, as a stringer covering a rural town for a regional Montana newspaper, I wrote a detailed feature on a 13-year-old local girl who committed suicide. I wanted to uncover the “why” of this tragedy without adding to the town’s pain. That proved impossible.

I first attended public meetings led by counselors and community leaders. I heard “experts” relentlessly stereotype adolescents as afflicted with crazy, impulsive, risk-happy brains and hormonal depression. All teens are “at risk,” they insisted; youth culture is rife with bullying peers and suicidal messages; your child may be next.

They recited the oft-repeated statement that “suicide is the leading cause of death for teens” (true only because teens rarely die from cancer, heart disease, etc.) to imply that teens have a high suicide rate, which they do not. The fact that teenagers are much less likely to kill themselves than adults are is embarrassing to us older folks in a society that stigmatizes mental illness and suicide as moral failings. So, authorities pretend these problems only afflict teenagers.

So, scratch that source. I was not going to help self-congratulating authorities on some baffling crusade to convince teenagers that suicide is somehow normative to adolescence.

The eagerness of adults to points accusing fingers at kids and their “culture” was appallingly typical in my 40 years of study and work with youth and persists today. Strangely, I never saw adults generalize from rare cases and impose collective guilt on our own privileged age group, despite our much higher suicide risks. We will never see a story in the New Yorker, USA Today, Dateline, or News at 11 on a teenager whose tragedy might be attributable to parents’ abuses and troubles, or who loses a parent, teacher, adult relative, etc., to suicide or overdose.

The only narrative and news story permissible, regardless of circumstances, is one that blames a teen tragedy on the teen’s own “adolescent risk-taking,” goading and bullying by peers, popular culture messages, and/or social media. No investigation beyond those cloned “causes” is allowed, a taboo so rigid it might as well be law. Reporters’ self-aggrandizing conceit that their sensational, formulaic stories are somehow bold, incisive commentaries on a “troubling teenage trend” or “epidemic” is journalistic malpractice.

Reality is much more difficult

So, all the standard approaches were proving useless. In fact, 1 in 40,000 13-year-old girls commits suicide, the Centers for Disease Control reports, the lowest rate by far of any teen or adult age group. The only 13-year-old girl to commit suicide in five states that year had done so in this town. She was not a “typical teen,” not a poster child for a troubled generation. Just the opposite: she was vanishingly atypical.

She deserved to be seen as an individual, not some generic Everyteen, not some brainless idiot who shot herself over a Metallica lyric, bad hair day, or mean hallway quip. I wound up centering my article on interviews with a dozen of her middle-school friends. If I was looking for an easy way out, I picked the wrong one.

The 12-15-year-olds were brutal. They excoriated adults for creating a climate in which young people avoided voicing their problems for fear of stigma, restriction, and punishment. But, unlike the adults shoveling responsibility off on kids, they reserved harsh criticisms for themselves.

The middle-schoolers agonized that their seemingly happy, well-liked, note-writing friend, who they described as a popular cheerleader candidate who had no enemies, never confided in them. They took responsibility for their own roles in her failure to seek help, even as they had no idea what would have helped. “What she did was wrong,” a seventh grader told me. “She hurt us a lot. But we never tried to get her to talk.”

In retrospect, my article focusing on the rural town as a microcosm of larger society’s isolation and callousness was unfair. One girl did what she did. In the end, no one knew why. No one suggested what specific action could have identified and deterred this particular girl in her particular circumstances from very rare self-destruction.

The context we need but never get

On the 2023 CDC survey of 20,000 adolescents, 9% reported attempting suicide, and 3% reported harming themselves. Those figures are widely and wildly embellished as proof of the teenage “mental health crisis.”

But no one mentions what those same teens who harm themselves and who attempt suicide say about their homes and parents: 86% were emotionally abused, 63% were violently abused by parents and household grownups, and 80% suffered parents’ and caretakers’ severe mental illness, suicidal behaviors, addiction, domestic violence, and/or jailing.

While 42% of suicide-attempting teens report having been cyberbullied, 93% of these same teens also report being bullied by parents/caretakers. California Attorney General Rob Bonta occasionally highlights (cases are rare) teens whose overdoses or suicides he believes can be blamed on social media and cyberbullying, a pet political project of his. Bonta also runs the state’s child abuse registry. Yet, I can find no cases in which Bonta featured teens’ overdoses or suicides related to parents’ abuses, or serious investigation of whether those whose deaths he blames on social media may have had broader problems.

However, that also didn’t seem to apply to the particular girl I was writing about. Her family, understandably, did not want to be interviewed. Her friends said they knew of no family troubles that would explain her suicide – nothing more than routine issues. “She always wanted to hear about everyone else’s problems,” one said. “But we never made her talk about hers.”

Press and “experts”: Cut it out

Looking back on my story decades later, I realize that while I never uncovered the “reasons why,” I at least understand why the middle-schoolers I interviewed said what they said. They felt in near unanimity that their town’s culture did not take them seriously as individuals; nor, conversely, did it see them as valuable members of larger society. Instead, they were treated simply as if their young age comprised some menacing, alien subculture.

My article failed at its main task, but it did show that younger teens’ introspection, insights, and shouldering a share of responsibility were vast improvements over the grownup reporters, politicians, and “experts” who spew quotable, one-size-fits-all claptrap on teen tragedies. The town’s leaders, like those elsewhere, seemed to learn nothing. I covered more community meetings and official bodies in which elders continued to demean their youth as a “problem,” always bad and getting worse, requiring ever-more restrictions and isolation.

And here we are, still in the same old mire, doing more of what we know doesn’t work. Until we have news media, political, and professional establishments with the honesty and guts to scrutinize teenagers’ and grownups’ suicides, overdoses, and other tragedies in full context, they ethically should call a halt to “teen tragedy” features. They’re just boilerplate junk cloaked in standard emotional rhetoric to make us feel good and the problem worse.