Palo Alto suicides are the topic of a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigation following two clusters of self-killings associated with an elite high school there.
A team of suicide prevention specialists are examining suicidal behavior among young people in wealthy
Santa Clara County between 2008 and 2015, The Huffington Post reported.
Six students or recent graduates of Henry M. Gunn High School died by suicide between
May 2009 and January 2010, The Atlantic reported. An “echo cluster” of suicides saw the deaths of four more youths between 2014 and 2015, and 42 Gunn students were hospitalized for having suicidal thoughts.
The adolescent suicide rate in the Silicon Valley city of Palo Alto is five times the
national rate, according to The Washington Post, which added that an average of 20 Santa Clara County children and young adults committed suicide each year between 2010 and 2014.
Santa Clara County officials called on the
CDC for help, the San Jose Mercury News reported. The CDC team arrived Tuesday and will remain for two weeks, working to identify risks, track trends, and formulate recommendations for a suicide prevention plan.
"I really appreciate when we can have federal support and can leverage that expertise at a local level," Mary Gloner, executive director of Palo Alto’s Project Safety Net, said, according to the Mercury News.
Efforts already underway in Palo Alto include expanded counseling services, later school start times to allow for more sleep, a student support group at Gunn High School, and new fencing along the Caltrain tracks, where many of the suicides took place.
The CDC completed a similar study last year in Fairfax County, Virginia. Among the risk factors listed there were “parents' pressure for success, parental denial of children's mental health issues, high counselor-to-student ratios at school, the occasional cruelty of social media, and the stigma of mental illness,” the Mercury News said.
Twitter users expressed their concerns over the issue.
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