The first bell of the day goes off at 8:15 A.M. By 8:30 A.M, students of Henry M. Gunn High School are usually in their first period classrooms, waiting for morning announcements. But, that didn't happen on November 4th, 2014.

I arrived a little late to school that morning, thinking I can't be late to my first period English class because I have an in-class essay exam that day. While I rushed to class, I noticed groups of students are still waiting outside of classrooms for doors to open. None of the teachers have arrived yet. Usually, my english teacher, Mr. Kitada, would already be inside the classroom, but his doors were still locked that morning. I didn't think much of it and waited with the rest of my classmates.

A few moments later, every single teacher arrived all at once holding a piece of white paper in their hands. I entered the classroom and took my seat, mentally preparing myself for the upcoming exam. But Mr. Kitada started the class with a heavy announcement instead. He began reading off the white paper, which I still vaguely remember goes along the lines of— "Early this morning, November 4th, 2014, a student from Gunn High school Cameron Lee took his own life." That line was enough for it to still haunt my memories today.

Cameron Lee was athletic, fun, and had an outgoing spirit. He was popular and well-liked among his peers at school. His death shook the Palo Alto community like never before. He was the first suicide to Palo Alto's second biggest suicide cluster, but my first of many more announcements during that school year. Couple months following Cameron's death, Quinn Gens and Harry Lee added to the the list.

It was Mr. Kitada's first time dealing with student suicides as a teacher as well. Terence Kitada is an English teacher at Gunn. He began teaching in 2013, just a year before, and said that he didn't feel the grief that day like some of his colleagues who had experienced the first Palo Alto suicide cluster in 2009. "I think my main concern as a teacher was thinking about student needs at the time." he said. "Because delivering that message to a class of 25, 26 students, there're so many different reactions." He recalled one of his students getting up and leaving the classroom in tears after he read the letter that morning. "She was just, like, not able to cope at all," he said.

I remembered that too.

left to right, top to bottom: Casey Cheng, Aurora Vaughn, Terrence Kitada, Kiana Fong, Crystal Guo, Kristy Blackburn.

History of Palo Alto's sucide clusters

Located at the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto ecompasses an image of prestige and success. Driving down one of the streets in the suburban city, rows of offices to tech giants like Apple, Google and Facebook line up next to each other. In addition, less than 10 minutes away is Stanford University, one of the country's top private colleges. All these institutions dominate the ideals of "success" for Palo Alto kids even at an early age. But that's only on the surface. Buried underneath all these stories of "overcoming adversities" and "achieving successes" mask the somber truths created by this so-called perfection.

"In seventh or eighth grade is when I already started feeling pressured to take tutoring classes," said Kiana Fong, a Gunn High School alum. "And I don't even know what you could get tutored for."

Fong graduated in 2017 and currently attends the University of Southern California (USC). She moved to Palo Alto from Millbrae, California in sixth grade and added that she instantly felt the competitiveness and the need to overachieve. "You're automatically put into this 'you need to be smart' mentality." Millbrae is located north of the San Francisco Bay Areas, way outside of Palo Alto's school district.

Casey Cheng, another Gunn High School alum who graduated in 2018, also said that he felt the pressure as a middle schooler in Palo Alto. He clarified that this pressure stemmed from everything, "not just your parents, but everyone around you expecting you to get good grades, go to a good college, all that," he said. Cheng is now a junior at USC.

Unlike Fong, Crystal Guo, another Gunn High School alum, lived her whole life in Palo Alto. She was aware of the reputation of her high school from the start. Although she didn't have any other places to compare, she added that the "high achievement" culture is her least favorite part about growing up there. "I felt like no matter what I was doing, I had to excel at it," she said.

Serious conversation and awareness of mental health among Palo Alto teens started as early as 2009, when four Gunn High School students jumped in front of oncoming trains operated by Caltrain, ABCNews reported back in 2009. This was when Palo Alto's first suicide-cluster happened.

According to the Center of Disease Control's 2016 Epi-Aid Investigation on Santa Clara Country, they defined a suicide cluster as a group of suicide deaths that occurred closer together in time or space than would be normally expected in Santa Clara County.

Even back in 2009, educators, parents and the entire community grappled and searched for answers to why kids are taking their own lives. When the suicide-cluster occurred during the 2014 and 2015 school year, it left an even bigger hole in the community.

Kristy Balckburn, Gunn High School English teacher, was there when both suicide-clusters happened. To her, the two clusters were very different. "It was really the first time any of us, I think, on campus had experienced something as dramatic as what happened in 2009," she said. "And then in 2014, more people felt impacted I think the second time around, because of the students who died by suicide. I think that was hard for our campus because the second time, it was a wider range of students who are grieving. So it was more of a whole campus thing."

Cheng was only a freshman when the 2014 suicide cluster occurred. He said that he had only heard stories of Gunn's unsettling reputation. "I didn't know it's that real," he said. Cheng added that he felt concerned about how early exposure to suicide and self-harm normalizes these sensational events for kids at a young age.

Before Cheng graduated from Gunn High School, he recounted another suicide that happened on his second day of senior year. But this time, it felt personal. "A kid from my grade, he took his own life," he said. "That was really tough because I had known him since middle school. We weren't super close but it was also one of those times where we all tried to rally together and help each other out."

After the second suicide-cluster in 2014, the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) requested the CDC and Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) to conduct an epidimological investigation, also known as Epi-Aid, to understand the data, characteristics and trends in youth suicide in Santa Clara County districts, including Palo Alto.

This report, Undetermined risk factors for suicide among youth, ages 10-24-Santa Clara County, CA, was published in November of 2016.

Teen Suicide Statistics and Media Coverage

During those years, teen suicide rates in Palo Alto is said to be four to five times higher than the national rate. In total, Palo Alto's two suicide clusters saw 10 teen deaths: six in the 2008-2009 school year and four in the 2014-2015 school year.

The increase suicide rates among people 10-24 years old compared to homocide rates. Graphic by National Center for Health Statistics.

Unfortunately, teen suicide is not something new. It has been a haunting challenge in America. Teen suicide is the second leading cause of death among the age group 15-24 years-olds, according to a National Center of Helath Statistic report that examined death rates among teenagers between the ages 10 to 24 years old during the years 2000 to 2017. In addition, the report also showed that suicide rates among 15-19 year-olds had at least a 10% average increase annually between 2014 and 2017. And this national data reflects the events of Palo Alto through a local lens.

Media outlets from Silicon Valley also recognized the seriousness of this crisis. Many articles were written and spotlighting the community. From local newspapers like the Palo Alto Weekly to general bay are outlets like San Jose Mercury News, the teen suicide epidemic seemed to plague the attention in Silicon Valley and came under intense scrutiny in 2014.

In 2009, media coverage on teen suicide was still fairly new and foreign, where 40% of the coverage were very much sensationalized, according to the 2016 CDC Epi-Aid investigation. The phrase "committed suicide" in articles were also very common with 32% of all articles included that phrase. Thankfully, news coverage on mental health got better throughout the years where description and phrases took into sensitivity and accountability. Sensationalized headlines declined and only six percent of articles published in 2015 used the phrase "committed suicide."

The most common characteristic for media outlets reporting on this issue is including descriptions of the suicide event. The local commuter trains, owned by Caltrains, run straight through Palo Alto, and among the articles, 76% of the articles included train-related suicide. This was also how Cameron died. In 2015, only 40% of articles about suicide included at least one suicide prevention hotline number.

Blackburn, who is also the student newspaper advisor at Gunn, oversaw how students at the high school covered these two clusters. She recalled in 2009 when her students tried to cover the event in the front page maybe was not the right thing to do. "It was the right thing to do as journalists, but maybe not the right thing to do as a community," she said. "So I think we learned there are some good ways of covering this issue and there's some bad ways of covering this issue. And I don't think our first choice was horrible, but I think that we could have been more sensitive to how we covered it."

The surge of teen suicide in Palo Alto in 2014 and the 2016 Epi-Aid report garnered national attention. The scrutiny of Palo Alto's mental health crisis weren't just at a community level anymore. National news outlets like The Washington Post and The Atlantic published articles about what was happening Palo Alto. Specifically, the publication of the The Atlantic article titled "Why are so many kids with bright prospects killing themselves in Palo Alto?" was one that the students felt it falsely portrayed the school, recalled Blackburn.

In response to that article, one of Balckburn’s journalism students decided to do something about it and "wanted to change a narrative around how people viewed, first of all, vulnerability: how it was okay to be vulnerable and how you could reach out for help. And then also how students are being portrayed." Shortly after, Gunn High School's student newspaper, The Oracle, launched a series called "Changing the Narrative". Stories about how students seeked help and overcame depression and anxiety for the students.

"[2014] was when everything started to change," said Blackburn. "And so the changing narrative piece was really the biggest part of that."

Today, the national teen suicide rate continues to rise. The national suicide rates for ages 10 to 24 from 2016 to 2018 is 10.3 per 10,000 people, compared to 7.0 in 2007-2009. And due to the stress caused by the COVID-19 pandemic this past year, mental health among young people is even more complicated. A school district in Las Vegas lost 19 students to suicide since th beginning of the pandemic. And educators across the country are grappling with the already added struggle that already exists in mental health for teens.

The Oracle has since stopped publishing "Changing the Narrative" stories. Blackburn said she doesn't know if she should be proud or not. "Because that means that people are feeling more okay with sharing their vulnerabilities, and they don't need a forum to do it," she said. "There seems to be less interest in that which, I think, might be a good thing because it means that has become more normalized."

Suicide Among College Students

At the college level, university students are also experiencing increasing levels of similar stress and academic pressure. During the Spring of 2019 semester, the University of California had a slew of student deaths that sent shockwaves through the university community. Out of the eight deaths during that semester, two were confirmed to be suicides, while the other six were drug related. Those same kids from Palo Alto are also USC students and felt this semester echoed the same trauma they went through during their teenage years.

"And the worst part is that you're almost, like, okay [with it] and [thinking] this is how we move forward instead of grieving,"said Fong.

What made the same incidents at the university level different for Cheng was seeing his peer reactions. Coming out of Palo Alto and have had prior exposure to school suicids, Cheng saw his USC peers brushing it off like it was nothing made him feel "a little bit unexpected."

Guo shared the same sentiment after she encountered some of her dormmates "making jokes" about the student deaths. "I was almost shocked," she said. "Like, how can people think that this is something that's okay to joke about especially [for me after] coming from Gunn, a school that has a reputation for being known as like the suicide school."

She added that USC's mental health resources could have been promoted and emphasized more to help with student's academic life. Aurora Vaughn, USC senior and Gunn High School alum of 2017, agrees with the lack of mental health inadequacy at USC. "Honestly, I do believe fully that everyone thinks they're doing their best," she said. "And I believe that there's definitely something to look at in the way that USC and the greater United States culture toward mental health. The approach that we have and the attitude we have toward needs to shift."

Today in Palo Alto

Looking back at how Palo Alto tackled the two suicided clusters, Guo said she recalled her school underwent major physical and curriculum transformations. According to Blackburn, Gunn High School constructed a two story building, dedicating an entire floor to be a wellness and counseling center.

"So it's become more central," she said, adding that it has become a more visible piece of the school campus that has helped with shifting the stigma surrounding mental health conversations. Guo added that this overt symbol should be something USC should adapt from Palo Alto. That, if it is there for everyone to see, the conversation will be more open as well.

In addition to a physical building, Gunn High School also rebranded a curriculum now called SELF. This program aims to help students develop healthy social-emotional skills, trust among peers and mentors, and a safe space to seek support. A cohort of 30 students in all grades is paired with one designated teacher, and they get together every week. For Kitada, SELF is still a work in progress to be accepted by all students. He feels optimistic, though, that the program is able to provide important content for his students and ultimately build the trust the program aims to do.

Blackburn says she already sees a shift in the way students view teachers as trusted adults rather than authoritative figures. "Teachers are people you can go to for help," she said. "I think that's something that I always try to be with my students."

And knowing that they have this support, Palo Alto students are one step closer towards that elusive happiness. But even with all the changes, there is still so much to be done. "I would say we're at the point where we are happy overall," said Kitada. He added that although the level of academic stress is still there, recognizing the impact and feelings allows students to seek the help they need. "I don't think we've gotten to the point where we're reduced overall academic stress yet. But hopefully, we're finding different ways to help students cope with it and that's a good first step."