Stories

The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine

February 25, 2007

By Keith O'Brien

In a quiet corner of Needham Cemetery, a photograph of Asya Leykin sits propped up against a low jagged stone serving as a temporary marker. The photo, framed and wrapped in plastic, has grown cloudy. But still, Mark Leykin, Asya’s father, keeps it here. On a recent afternoon, he stoops, adjusts the photo, and then rakes his hands across the dirt around her grave, clearing away the dead leaves. He wants everything to look just so. The photo, these flowers, and this stone in the ground are about all he has left of his daughter.

Her suicide came third, in October 2005, about a year after Greg Gatto’s and Young-Chul Hong’s, and six months before Kyle Shapiro’s. Four Needham teenagers in less than two years. The kids – even Gatto and Hong, who, by chance, killed themselves on the same day – were not friends. Their deaths are not linked in any way that school officials or police have announced, other than the fact that they all lived in the same town. But their names are linked now, all mentioned in the same breath, as if they ran in the same crowd. There they are together: Gatto, the 2004 graduate of Needham High School and cocaptain of the football team who killed himself at age 19 in his dormitory at Hofstra University in New York; Hong, the 13-year-old middle school student who lived on the Gatto family’s street; Leykin, the 17-year-old rock climber who killed herself in her bedroom while her father slept down the hall; and then Shapiro, the popular 17-year-old junior whose suicide in April 2006 finally forced a public discussion about the shocking events that Needham residents had been talking about around their dinner tables for months.

It’s not that Shapiro’s death was somehow more significant than the others. “Each individual was a real, tragic loss for the community,” says Denise Garlick, chairwoman of the Needham Board of Health. But until the fourth suicide, residents here say, there always seemed to be a reason to turn away from the problem. The first two suicides came on the same day, sure. But one of the teens was in middle school, the other had just gone off to college. This was a tragic coincidence. Then came Asya’s death. At the high school, kids say, they were told little about it – including the cause. So while students knew that something terrible had happened, says senior Nithya Prabhala, they didn’t find out until later that Asya had killed herself. There was a feeling after this third suicide, Prabhala says, that school officials and even students wanted to “sweep it under the carpet” and move on.

With Shapiro’s death, everything changed. “You reach a point where you can’t ignore the problem anymore, and you have to say that it’s not a one-time thing. It’s a problem,” says Needham High School senior Maddie Gifford. “And so, after the fourth suicide, students wanted to see something happen. They needed a reaction from the community, the administration, someone to acknowledge and address the problem.”

The community responded. In May of last year, school and town administrators formed a task force they called the Needham Coalition for Suicide Prevention. Its goal is to tackle the town’s teen suicide problem and offer solutions. Garlick, from the board of health, and George Johnson, director of student development for Needham Public Schools, tapped 35 people to help them do the job: teachers, medical experts, police and town officials, five parents, three students, two ministers, and a rabbi, among others. If the town was going to change, the thinking went, everyone needed to buy into the new Needham.

Alan Holmlund, director of the suicide prevention program at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, has seen towns react to suicides but has never seen a group quite like this one before. “They could very well be a model for other towns,” he says, “because, unfortunately, these kinds of things do happen in other towns.” Holmlund says he won’t know if the coalition is a success, however, until he sees a reduction in suicides and suicide attempts in Needham – a daunting task for any group.

As coalition members are learning, there is no one way to attack teen suicide. The issue involves a host of complicated factors, including substance abuse, depression, mental illness, family history, family life, and lack of access to experts who can help. Even antidepressant medications have been in question since a 2004 Food and Drug Administration warning that some of these drugs can lead to suicidal thoughts in children and teens. “I don’t really know what the answer is,” says Joe Barnes, the now-retired longtime principal of Pollard Middle School, which Hong attended. He is also a member of the coalition. “My fear is we’re doing all the right things now and that many of the incidents – whether it happens to be tragedies with auto accidents and kids being killed, or students taking their own lives – even our best efforts wouldn’t have changed the outcome.” Families and school officials can identify a child in need, get him or her into counseling, and try to help, and still that child may commit suicide. “You can’t always stop it,” says Needham High School counselor Jennifer Roberts, “which is so scary.”

THE TOWN OF NEEDHAM, population 29,000, is a fine place to live, by any measure. It’s a quiet community, with all the charm of traditional New England and all the perks of modern-day suburban living. Nice yards. Two-car garages. Violent crime is rare. In 2006, police responded to exactly zero murder scenes in Needham – a pretty typical year. The median family income in Needham is $107,000 a year, more than double Boston’s, and the schools are some of the best in Massachusetts, consistently scoring among the highest in the state on mandated standardized tests. Kids study. A lot. Roughly 95 percent of them are going to college – it’s just a question of where – and this understandably has made parents proud. “I think the average kid at Needham High isn’t average,” says mother of three Deb Jacob. “They’re so far above average.”

In the wake of the suicides, residents were at a loss. Parents worried about their children. Children worried about the town. The irrational idea that Needham was somehow cursed began to float around in the ether. But the statistical reality is far less mysterious. Suicides happen, on average, more than once a day in Massachusetts, according to 2004 numbers, the last year with complete state data, and among adolescents about once every two weeks. Needham, for the most part, had escaped these tragedies between 1994 and 2003, suffering just one teen suicide in that time. The town’s suicide rate during that period was roughly the same as many other communities its size.

At the same time, teenagers in Needham were thinking about suicide, and even attempting it. The town’s 2005 youth risk behavior survey – developed by the Centers for Disease Control and given to Needham High School students every two years – revealed that 11 percent of the school, or 145 students, said they had contemplated suicide, while 8 percent, 102 students, had gone so far as to make a plan to kill themselves, and 4 percent, or 45 students, had actually tried to commit suicide at least once.

“Those are high numbers,” says Jon Mattleman, director of the town’s Youth Commission. “If we had that many kids having the flu, for example, to me, we might call it a crisis. But with suicide, it is a difficult issue to confront, to acknowledge, and to call it a crisis.” Sure, 45 kids is a lot – more than a classroom. But the numbers from that survey were far lower than in Needham surveys dating back to 1995, and lower than statewide averages, too. Effectively, at the time of the four suicides, Needham High students didn’t just appear healthier than their peers across the state, they also appeared to be healthier than their brothers and sisters who had graduated from the high school 10 years before them. With four dead kids, what appeared to be true no longer mattered. “Completed suicides get people’s attention,” says Mattleman. “The losses gave people a reason to take a hard look at those numbers.”

But the Needham coalition has not set out to explain the four deaths. This is a community trying to examine its culture, its schools, and its families in order to keep its kids safe. And last fall, in its first real act, the coalition convened focus groups and asked questions of Needham residents from every slice of society. Anonymous townspeople spoke their minds. Life in Needham was called too competitive, too much about “keeping up with the Joneses.” Kids were deemed “spoiled rotten.” Parents talked about feeling isolated in “a very, very busy town” and stressed out about saying both no and yes to their kids. They said they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between someone who was depressed and someone considering suicide. Teachers talked about the intense pressure that kids faced at school and at home. “The parents went to Harvard,” said one, “and their kids are going to go to Harvard.” At least one student seemed to agree. “It seems like we’re only statistics – how many of us will get into college,” the student said in a focus group. “No one really cares about who we are.”

Needham certainly hasn’t cornered the market on angst, stress, or ramped-up expectations for youth. What’s troubling is that kids in the focus groups reported that they weren’t sure that seeing a mental-health professional would help if they were thinking of killing themselves. One put it this way: “They’ll tell my parents.”

IT IS A PROBLEM, some say, that nearly a year after the last teen suicide in Needham and nine months after the coalition was formed, little actually has changed in the town. Students who are on the coalition say their classmates have no idea that it even exists and some parents are becoming impatient. “After the last death, Kyle Shapiro’s death, there was a hue and cry in the town: ‘We’ve got to do something,’ ” says Harry Klein, father of a Needham High School senior. “The whole community was incredibly motivated, and this coalition was announced. And that really was the last that anybody heard anything about them.”

Maybe there simply hadn’t been enough action for people to notice. At one meeting last fall, after two more Needham kids had died – this time in a car accident – student member Prabhala recalls how an entire commission meeting was lost as adults grasped for answers. “People wanted to talk about addressing alcohol issues in Needham, drug issues in Needham, the whole parent-teacher-student relationship, the whole basis for how kids are brought up,” says Prabhala. “And when you got to the end of the meeting, you were like: ‘What are we here for?’ ”

The Wellesley Hills nonprofit Screening for Mental Health has introduced its Signs of Suicide program – which teaches students how to recognize when a peer is contemplating suicide and how to respond – in 3,500 schools nationwide, including 268 in Massachusetts. But in December, Barbara Kopans, then the group’s executive director, expressed frustration that Needham schools hadn’t adopted SOS – or any other suicide prevention program. “I think they’re trying to do something,” says Kopans, who has since left the program. “They’re trying to address the issue. But sometimes there’s so much study – you can study something and bring in so many confounding issues – that nothing gets done.”

Johnson, a coalition leader, understands the frustrations. “I know there’s been a lot of impatience – ‘You’ve got to do something quicker,’ ” he says. “But I’m not always convinced that some things you do are useful.” What was important to the coalition, he says, was not doing something quickly, but doing something effectively.

Now, after months of sometimes contentious debate, changes are afoot. Media campaigns are in the works. Fliers advocating suicide awareness have been printed. By the spring, the coalition hopes to have created a traveling library of suicide prevention books and materials that will make stops at the high school, the library, and other places parents and students might visit. On the last weekend in April, the coalition is asking that spiritual leaders in every church and synagogue in town focus on the issue in their sermons. And, finally, things are changing in the schools.

Needham High School had plans to roll out a new curriculum this month that teaches coping skills to students and trains teachers to identify potentially suicidal kids. In addition, students there will start SOS, the program developed by Screening for Mental Health. There has also been one high-profile change. In December, Needham High principal Paul Richards announced the school would no longer send the honor roll to the town newspaper for publication. The news was not well received by some locals. The story went national. Within days, Jay Leno was mocking the decision on The Tonight Show, talk radio’s Rush Limbaugh was vilifying the people behind it, and Richards was sitting in his office stunned.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with the suicides,” Richards says of the decision to keep the honor roll from being published. “It has to do with the stress.” Since Leno, this has been Richards’s line. But four dead kids almost certainly had something to do with the decision to try to lower stress levels. Folks in Needham these days are rethinking lots of things, including whether it’s important for everyone to know that little Johnny made good grades. At least one family, Kyle Shapiro’s, thinks that’s a good thing. His parents, Andy Shapiro and Ruth Bonsignore, have said they never really thought about it before their son took his life. But now, too late, they recall him reading the honor roll – “the local list of who’s who” – and walking away disappointed, knowing he had not made that list.

“Some may say that we are doing too much to cater to a few kids who are struggling,” his parents wrote in a letter they sent in December to the Needham Times and to me after they learned the Globe Magazine was preparing a story. “We say, look around. Many of our kids are struggling in one way or another and we believe the majority of the parents in Needham are worried about our youth. The next big test will be, are we ready to really do something about it? In our opinion, it is time to shepherd (read protect, guide, and watch, not drive) the sheep, because losing one, trust us, is one too many.”

On this, everyone in Needham agrees. In the last couple of years, responding to one suicide after another, Johnson now believes that they erred by memorializing dead students too much. Mental-health experts warn that you never want to give depressed students the idea that they will be honored if they decide to kill themselves. Richards admits communication could have been better and says that trying to push on with classes as usual when what students really wanted to do was just sit in the halls with friends was a mistake. But he doesn’t believe the honor roll change is a mistake. “Our high-achievement, high-expectations culture is fine,” he says. “Our kids perform, they do great things. But there is an edge to that.”

Richards feels it in the school, he says, and so do many of the kids who walk the hallways there. Kids are stressed, sure. But the stress is no longer just about getting good grades and making the team, scoring well on the SAT and getting into a good college. Kids say they are waiting, waiting for the next bad thing to happen, the next moment of silence. High school junior Jane Handel says that by last spring, news of a student’s death had become something of a drill. Get the announcement. Walk out into the quiet hallways. Hear a distant sob. Mourn a couple of days. Get back to work. But it’s not so simple to move on, Handel says. In a town asking tough questions, kids for a while last spring began looking around and asking one of their own: “Who’s next?” The answer, they hope, is no one.

Keith O’Brien is a writer based in Jamaica Plain. His last feature for the magazine was a profile of rower John Yasaitis. E-mail comments to keith@keithob.com.