Will Jones April 27, 2011 Final Writing Project WRTG Search of Suicide

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1 Will Jones April 27, 2011 Final Writing Project WRTG Search of Suicide Suicide is a complex topic and this paper is not meant to give an absolute answer to why teenagers commit suicide. What I wanted to do with this piece was to explore the topic through my personal experiences of suicide and tragedy among teenagers along with research on certain aspects of suicide. My audience consists of people who are curious about suicide, who have troubles approaching the topic, and who want to read about personal struggles and explorations of the topic. Suicide is extremely personal, so it helps to explore and get out ideas on the topic through using this creative non-fiction style. I link my own experiences and realizations with the aspects of suicide in the research. Greg Barnes represents someone who committed suicide after a tragedy that I am also affected by, so trying to search multiple areas of his death along with my own thoughts and feelings helps to search for some understanding of a complicated topic. I want to show how complex teenage suicide really is, show how hard it is to understand, but make a point about focusing on life, rather than all the death presented by suicide, in order to gain some peace with the topic.

2 In my first year of high school, I walked through the halls of the school and noticed the pain and confusion on my fellow students faces as they mourned another student who had just committed suicide the night before. Another suicide. I got used to seeing crosses with the victims names and dates of their death on them, the t-shirts with the student s faces on them, and even the Facebook posts responding to a friend s suicide with, I am missing you now more than ever. You had better be partying up in heaven my best friend. But I also got used to searching for what I could not see, some sort of understanding. I desperately asked myself why any of this happened, why would these students end their own life, and what does it all mean? Looking for some sort of understanding to tragedy is not uncommon in my community. I graduated from Columbine High School, a school that I love deeply, in Unfortunately, on April 20, 1999, 12 students and one teacher were tragically killed in what would be the deadliest high school shooting in history. I was in first grade when it happened, and while I could comprehend what occurred on a surface level, there was no way I could come close to answering any of the questions that raced through my head. There was so much confusion surrounding me. I even had dreams of my own classmates shooting me at my elementary school. In order to possibly grasp some small bit of understanding, I enveloped myself in the event. I drew pictures, watched the news, watched a bloodied student my family knew thrust himself out of a window of the school to safety, read books, and imagined the events play out over and over in my mind. It helped me feel like I had a stronger grasp of the situation. However, the deaths did not stop. That tragic event may have claimed another life a year later; Greg Barnes, a survivor of the shootings, committed suicide in May of 2000, two weeks after the events

3 one-year anniversary. And then more confusion arose. Along with processing how the lives of 13 people suddenly came to an abrupt halt, I was confronted with the question of suicide an act where someone actually decides to stop living. When so many people were dealing with tragedy, why did Greg Barnes kill himself? According to Jami Jones, an assistant professor at East Carolina University, it is not the event that causes trauma, but rather how a person perceives and thinks about the experience, that can greatly influence someone. I know how I coped with the tragedy at such a young age, but for someone like Greg Barnes, being extremely close to the event and having a good friend, Matt Kechter, get killed that day, suicide appeared to be his way out. What exactly was Greg thinking when contemplating the shootings? Teens, like Greg, may not attain functionally mature levels of processing until adulthood, and that "may lead to a more rigid coping style (Amirkhan and Auyeung). A teenager who is coping with a tragic event may not have dynamic thinking skills; their strategies of problem solving can be more rash and unreasonable. So unreasonable, in fact, that death actually looks appealing. Suicide seemed to be a threat just as unpredictable as a school shooting; I needed to reach some understanding of suicide so I would stop feeling like it would be something that would happen to me as if I had no control over it. The list showing the top ten causes of teenage deaths on statisticstop10.com has suicide at number three. Most people experience some sort of tremendous pain in their life, but it is hard to actually imagine turning to suicide as an answer. I could not understand the consideration of the act. I felt like suicidal thoughts could be something floating around all of us ready to creep in without us knowing; I did not feel safe. When I was younger I enveloped myself in the topic in the same way I faced the shootings. I would ask my mom why people committed

4 suicide, and she responded by saying, Suicide is like a sickness. People just have something in their brains that make them think a certain way. I found comfort in knowing mental health issues contributes greatly to teen suicides. It was some inroad to fighting off this epidemic. Mental health can be a factor for 90 percent of people who kill themselves, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. It seemed easy to associate Greg s death with the traumatic event he experienced, but an article coming out in The Denver Post around the time of his suicide states, mental health experts cautioned against linking Barnes' death to the Columbine shootings without knowing why he committed suicide" (Olinger). Greg could have had a mental defect or chemical imbalance. By viewing suicide as a sickness, I seemed to believe it was a curable disease. A disease I could never suffer from because studies do show that the introduction of the SSRI s, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, was believed to contribute to the steady decrease in suicides between 1990 and 2003 (Horowitz). Greg might not have ended his life because of the shootings; he might not have ended his life because of great tragedy and pain. It was just an illness. I thought we could all survive tragedy of all forms through treating a kind of disease. I thought we were saved. I thought medication could beat suicide. But I was wrong. Medicine could not help as lay on my bedroom floor, trying to shove myself underneath my bed as tears ran down my face, trying to find refuge from such a cruel world. As I grew up, I started to encounter the harsher aspects of life when dealing with personal loss or disappointment. I have been in such dark moments where I thought mental health was a cruel joke. If only I did have a mental illness, I wished. I could not take pills and be fixed, however. Happiness was not that simple, so I latched to things

5 outside of myself like movies or music to bring some hope and perspective into my life. A report by Heidi Adams and Lela Williams, from Arizona State University, includes an interview with one adolescent who states that teens see the movies and they are like, Oh, happy ending. They kiss. This is how it is going to end. (Adams and Williams). I must admit that I encounter this problem almost everyday. I believed my last romantic relationship to be very much like the movie 500 Days of Summer, and this lead me to be disappointed when I discovered my relationship was not some incredibly romantic, fantastical entity. In response to the failure of that relationship, I would listen to the most depressing music, and dissected out each lyric that properly expressed my pain. I was sitting in my dorm room the other day listening to Adam s Song by Blink-182, a song with lyrics saying, I m too depressed to go on, you ll be sorry when I m gone, and my roommate said, This song still gives me chills. My sister s close friend hung himself to this song. That friend was indeed Greg Barnes. The same song I was listening to was playing on repeat when his parents discovered him dead (Olinger). I was not listening to the song in order think about my own suicide whatsoever, but I can see where Greg was coming from by using a song to express some kind of emotion or message. Sian Lincoln, from School of Social Sciences, University College Northampton, explains how music has to do with the reflexive self, musical choices based on mood or state of mind, a desire to evoke memories or set a tone or atmosphere. I used music to relive my past and have my pain reciprocated back and forth between the music and myself. It is like using the music as a mirror to see the feelings inside. Did Greg Barnes finally decide to kill himself because he listened to Adam s Song too many times? It is not clear. Whether or not it was the cause, Greg used the media around him to help express his thoughts after

6 he had passed on in hopes someone would hear it and understand something, but what might he have wanted? When I think back to a past break up or fight with a loved one, I hear those words I never wanted to hear over and over in my head. Tears blur my vision of the world in a way in which I can see all the cruelty. A loss provides nowhere to go. I cannot communicate how much I feel, how much I care. Would suicide be the ultimate revenge? Can a person care so much for another that they would forfeit his or her life to make that lost love understand? It does not seem like a fair way to create understanding. Rejection can be a very difficult thing for a teen to handle. Especially when it comes to those processes of lust, attraction, and attachment, that can make early romance one of the single most stressful developmental processes (Jones). The feeling of not being understood or accepted by another can be devastating during the teen years. I discussed a break up with one of my ex-girlfriends, and the only thing she did not want to hear me say was the D word. Depressed. While teenagers can use suicidal behavior as a way to find new ways of adjustment to a life situation, or to communicate a cry for help, death is not a way to connect with someone (Bolognini, et al). To not be understood by others just distances a person from the world. But death creates a permanent disconnect. During times of loss, it feels good to receive empathy form others. Did Greg feel the need to be understood? Maybe Greg felt incapable to communicate his pain to others in thinking no one could possibly understand his pain. I remember first learning about Greg Barnes while I was watching my brother play basketball at Columbine a few years before I enrolled there. I was sitting with my parents in support of my brother, when we started talking about Greg. My mom said, It

7 still breaks my heart to think about. He was such a great basketball player. I hope you realize, Will, that suicide is one of the most selfish thing you could do. It was not a criticism of Greg as much as a realization that so much will be left behind, including a mourning family. I can see just how fortunate I am to have the family I do when suicidal behavior in adolescents can be seen as instances of... confusion in the family... loosening of family ties... overly close parent-child relationships, and also a loss of intimacy (Koopmans). Dependency on family at early ages is undeniable; we would all have trouble surviving if a family, a place, an ideal, or some culture did not raise us. We need some kind of connection so that we do not feel insignificant and alone. Greg s family must have been so relieved to see him return home safely after the Columbine shootings, but so heartbroken to lose him a year later. Maybe Greg could have realized that people actually did understand him if he could have seen all the loved ones that miss him so much. Maybe he could see that he was not alone, he had his family. My mom concluded by saying, It is such a waste. She was not suggesting that suicide victims die in vain, or wasted their life, but only implied that there was so much more to live for, so much potential for love to be had within the family and in the rest of life. There is a tomorrow. I wish I could tell Greg Barnes that whatever he was feeling was just temporary; he did not have to make it permanent. I wish I could extend my thoughts out to him. I know how much he cared for his school and friends. For what we value so highly can sometimes destroy us. When we appreciate love so much, we can be more prone to experience heartbreak. When we value freedom so highly, we can feel trapped. Does that imply that when we focus so much on death, we can appreciate life? I think valuing life, can make us appreciate life that much more. Tragedy does not define a

8 community, tragedy cannot define a school, and suicide does not define the person who commits it. There is no exact definition or answer to suicide. And tragedy can never be fully understood. Greg Barnes will not be defined by suicide; he will be remembered for how he lived his life. He will be remembered through the people who live on with him in their hearts. They keep his memory alive. What I came to realize is that 13 victims of the shootings, and the victims of suicide, would truly want me to go live my life, and realize that I have a choice. I can choose how I perceive a situation. I can choose life. We all can. We live on without the ones we lose, but they are always with us. The confusion and heartbreak suicide presents, shows us that we do care for others. An understanding can be found within ourselves. We look for an answer to all the death that occurs, and ask what suicide really means and why it happens. I do not know why teenagers commit suicide. There is no exact answer. But the understanding is staring us in the face everyday. The understanding is life. Even in the hardest of times, connections can be formed. By carrying on with the victims in our hearts and we can keep the connections with them alive. The unanswerable question to what causes teen suicide should make us see some understanding of life the love and care we can have for others, the connections we have and would never give up for anything, a song we love, the excitement to discover another song, the pain that shows us we are alive, the tears that show us how much heart we all have, the beauty in each day, and the beauty in tomorrow.

9 Works Cited Adams, Heidi and Lela Rankin Williams. "Advice from Teens to Teens about Dating: Implications for Healthy Relationships." Children & Youth Services Review 33.2 (2011): Print. Amirkhan, James, and Bonnie Auyeung. "Coping with Stress Across the Lifespan: Absolute Vs. Relative Changes in Strategy." Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 28.4 (2007): Print. Bolognini, Monique, et al. "Adolescent's Suicide Attempts: Populations at Risk, Vulnerability, and Substance use." Substance use & misuse (2003): Print. Horowitz, Karyn. "Dispelling the Myths Surrounding Teen Suicide." Brown University Child & Adolescent Behavior Letter (2009): 1-7. Print. Jones, Jami L. "Freak Out Or Melt Down: Teen Responses to Trauma and Depression." Young Adult Library Services 7.1 (2008): Print. Koopmans, Matthijs. "A Case of Family Dysfunction and Teenage Suicide Attempt: Applicability of Family Systems Paradigm." Adolescence (1995): 87. Print. Lincoln, Sian. "Feeling the Noise: Teenagers, Bedrooms and Music." Leisure Studies 24.4 (2005): Print. "NIMH The Numbers Count: Mental Disorders in America." NIMH Home. Web. 20 Feb Olinger, David, and Neil H. Devlin. "Song Only Clue To Student's Despair." Web. 17 Feb < "Statistics Top 10 - Causes of Death Older Teens." Statistics Top 10 - Death Statistics. 7 Mar Web. 27 Feb <