Behavior: Could Suicide Be Contagious?

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Various researchers have blamed youth suicides on such disparate causes as the Viet Nam War, television, the drug culture and stress generated by the sheer number of baby boomers. Los Angeles Clinical Psychologist Michael Peck suggests that in today's highly mobile families, the high rate of divorce and generally "less available parenting" have left adolescents with little emotional backup.

Even so, specialists in adolescent development argue that these factors merely add to the normal turbulence of adolescent identity crisis and separation from parents. Harvard Psychiatrist Douglas Jacobs says that "certain teens reach the point where they feel they are not going to achieve an identity. They don't see a future. For a moment in time, suicide seems to be the only way to get relief."

Louise Kaplan, a New York psychologist specializing in childhood and adolescence, says teenagers go through a normal period of depression and mourning for the loss of childhood attachment. The job of parents, she says, is to help youngsters remove their passions from the family and place them in the outside community. "That's one reason why so many boys seem to kill themselves after breaking up with a girlfriend," she says. "The breakup is felt as a failure to break out of the family orbit."

In Omaha last week, parents, students and community leaders struggled to come to their own understanding of the sad epidemic. Barbara Wheeler, a store manager who works with the city's "personal crisis" hot line, thought that the Midwest's economic plight places a great burden on status-conscious teens. "Peer pressure about images is worse than ever," she said. Bryan students talked about heavy pressure for good grades and social success. Said Chris Longacre, 17: "You feel like if you make one mistake, your future is gone." Bryan's principal, John McQuinn, pointed to prosuicide rock lyrics, complaining that "we have a 'life is cheap' philosophy fed to young people." Others expressed the wistful hope that somewhere in the seemingly pointless deaths lay a lesson for the community. Said Assistant School Superintendent Rene Hlavac: "The three young people left us a message and we need to search and find it."