“The Silicon Valley Suicides”
“While reporting this story, I came to understand quite a lot about academic stress and adolescent misery, and about my own parenting, and about how urgent it is for parents and educators to question their own good intentions. But the link between teenage alienation and the decision to die never much clarified. In fact, the closer I got to the heart of this story, the less I felt I understood that link.”
So, this is an article about my hometown and what I still consider to be my community. I organized a dialogue on teen mental health this summer and have been working with a group of alumni of the Palo Alto high schools ever since to continue to hold these events and engage other alumni in clarifying the problem statement and establishing solutions.
When I heard about this article a few days before it was published, I was excited — there are so many things I wanted to see talked about, and I assumed that a journalist taking a systemic approach to an issue might explore them. Palo Alto is a really special place, and Palo Alto kids are really exceptional people. And I don’t mean that as an indication of, like, how many of us cross the street to go to Stanford every year — I mean that my peers were self aware and passionate and deeply caring.
When I was a student at Paly, we had all sorts of social norms around not triggering our sense of failure — we didn’t share grades or SAT scores except with close friends, we sent each other notes and formed study groups and checked in when people missed school, and it was a huge faux pas to post on facebook when we were accepted to colleges. My favorite thing about my high school was our “rejection wall”, where seniors would publicly post their rejection letters from college and post-high school jobs; by the end of the semester, it would be absolutely overflowing.
I don’t get any of that in this article, so I have a lot of mixed feelings — which kind of get into my feelings about The Atlantic in general. The article is worth reading because it presents some useful ideas and perspectives about teen mental health in affluent, high-pressure environments (if that is something you care about). However, I do not think it provides a useful understanding of Palo Alto or the circumstances of the deaths in Palo Alto. I love my hometown in that way that makes you extremely aware of and sensitive to its faults, and I talk about them a lot. And I am now realizing how flawed reporting can be when someone profiles your community in order to illustrate a larger narrative. (For example, no one calls Gunn “the suicide school”).
Hanna Rosin and her editors phrase the problem as teen suicide deaths (and are not shy about bringing up the train), and point all their fingers at academic stress created by Palo Alto parents. The article identifies and then sensationalizes several toxic elements of Palo Alto culture, and takes an under-integrated and absolutist perspective on socioeconomic class. It scares us about millennials/gen-Z being traumatized by social media and helicopter parenting and our test-and-outcomes-driven education system, and turning into empty over-sensitive automatons who are unable to think for ourselves.
In this way, the Atlantic successfully sells this edition of the magazine and subtly encourage their audience to keep reading — they have told America’s upper-class parents that they might be killing their children, and they have implied that writers at The Atlantic are grappling with the problem and will be issuing instructions as they find the answers. The Atlantic isn’t the only publication that is doing this, but there is so little empathy here, and so many things that are only going to raise the anxiety of parents and make American parenting even more of a war between reality and a keeningly aggressive list of impossible expectations.
I will be the first person to agree that Palo Alto culture needs to change, and that parents need to be part of that change. But parents are not the villain of the story — I have heard from a lot of parents that they really want to learn and they aren’t finding resources. My parents, and my friends’ parents, don’t deserve this burden. From my perspective, mental health is a problem for both children and adults who are present in the Palo Alto culture, and the resultant deaths have been traumatic for everyone. Suggesting that the parents are responsible for creating this culture is only going to increase their anxiety, and take us further from addressing the root causes.
Right now, I am understanding the mental health problems in Palo Alto as the result of identity threat: we often understand the true “Palo Altan” to be genius-like, successful, meritorious, and highly paid with an elite occupation. If we want to address this root cause, we need to have community dialogue that reveals who we really are and what we really want for ourselves.
