Could Suicide Be Contagious?

By John Leo.

Cheerleaders wearing the school's gold-and-green colors led the emotional pep rally. More than a thousand pupils--almost the entire student body--assembled, many of them wearing paper hearts with the words CHOOSE LIFE. They hugged one another, cheered their athletic teams and sang We Are the World. The lyric "We're saving our own lives" understandably brought many to tears: the rally had been called to calm the student body after three youths at Bryan High School on the outskirts of Omaha committed suicide within five days.

The three knew one another only vaguely. They were ordinary youngsters with no apparent problems who lived in a predominantly Roman Catholic, blue-collar community. Michele Money, 16, described by friends as a positive, dependable person, had had problems with her boyfriend and talked about dropping out of school. She died of an overdose of Elavil, her mother's antidepressant. Mark Walpus, 15, was a popular, athletic youngster who had recently spent a lot of time by himself building a drill press. He shot himself in the chest. Tom Wacha, 18, a loner who planned to go to trade school, also shot himself. According to police, he had told a friend that he was "disgusted with life." In addition to these three, four other Bryan students tried to kill themselves in the past three weeks but failed.

The spree of self-destruction sent a shock wave through the school, which was locally branded "Suicide High." Counselors reported that some students dreaded going to class, fearing that another classmate would be dead. "Some of the youngsters are terribly upset and can't seem to control themselves," observed Guidance Counselor Nancy Bednar. "It's a sense of 'Who will be next?' " Teachers urged students to take a pledge not to make "any big decisions . . . without taking a day to think it over." At a forum on the suicides, parents and others shouted down Psychiatrist John Florian Riedler with such comments as "I once tried to commit suicide, years ago. No one ever tried to help me." Said Riedler: "Hysteria swept over this part of town last week."

The Omaha deaths raise an obvious question: Is suicide contagious? Recent clusters of adolescent suicides suggest that the answer is yes. In a twelve- month period beginning in February 1983, seven teenagers in Plano, Texas, committed suicide, four by carbon-monoxide poisoning, three by guns. Five boys in New York's Westchester and Putnam counties died by their own hand in February 1984, four of them by hanging. Within the past two weeks, one student at David Prouty High School in Spencer, Mass., committed suicide; at least two schoolmates, possibly four, tried to kill themselves and failed.

Researchers know very little about cluster suicides. Some may be merely coincidences; others may be self-dramatizing efforts to capture the same outpouring of sympathy that surrounded an earlier death. According to Dr. Mark Rosenberg of Atlanta's Centers for Disease Control, clusters probably occur "much more frequently than we find out about." Suicides generally tend to be underreported, he notes, in part because of concern about stigmatizing the deceased. Nonetheless, suicide is the third leading cause of death in - adolescents and young adults. In the 15-to-19-year age group, the suicide rate has almost tripled since 1958. However, since 1981, the rate has begun to level off.

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."

With reporting by Elizabeth Taylor/ Omaha, with other bureaus