[oldalum]

Good article that touches on many of the issues. The psychiatrist who performed the never-published "psychiatric autopsy" on the 2009 cluster told me that academic stress, while certainly a contributing factor, was not the primary driver or not a major factor. The teens had major depressive illness, undiagnosed but evident in retrospect from signs, conversations with friends, Facebook posts, etc., and they lived in a town where there is a highly effective and available means of suicide (the majority of suicide attemps fail, but tall buildings, trains and guns are very effective). The focus after 2009 was on training students, parents, and others to recognize those signs of depression in others for what they are and get professional help for the students, which seemed to work until this year.

Although academic/getting into college pressure is involved in varying degrees in each suicide, I think the high stress/high pressure environment in top high schools today is an important problem that is worth trying to fix even apart from the extreme of suicide. The colleges do have some responsibility for this. Just as standardized testing incentivizes teaching to the test, what colleges show by their actions works in college admissions incentivizes doing what works in getting into college. If all selective colleges would announce they will consider a maximum of 3 AP classes, and have an administrative assistant randomly scrub the AP designation from all but 3 AP classes on every transcript, students would take more than 3 AP classes only because they truly want to. What is the point of taking numerous college classes in high school, anyway--isn't that what college is for? Seems to me there are many more non-academic things kids should be spending their time doing during their high school years.

[oldalum]

Good article that touches on many of the issues. The psychiatrist who performed the never-published "psychiatric autopsy" on the 2009 cluster told me that academic stress, while certainly a contributing factor, was not the primary driver or not a major factor. The teens had major depressive illness, undiagnosed but evident in retrospect from signs, conversations with friends, Facebook posts, etc., and they lived in a town where there is a highly effective and available means of suicide (the majority of suicide attemps fail, but tall buildings, trains and guns are very effective). The focus after 2009 was on training students, parents, and others to recognize those signs of depression in others for what they are and get professional help for the students, which seemed to work until this year.

Although academic/getting into college pressure is involved in varying degrees in each suicide, I think the high stress/high pressure environment in top high schools today is an important problem that is worth trying to fix even apart from the extreme of suicide. The colleges do have some responsibility for this. Just as standardized testing incentivizes teaching to the test, what colleges show by their actions works in college admissions incentivizes doing what works in getting into college. If all selective colleges would announce they will consider a maximum of 3 AP classes, and have an administrative assistant randomly scrub the AP designation from all but 3 AP classes on every transcript, students would take more than 3 AP classes only because they truly want to. What is the point of taking numerous college classes in high school, anyway--isn't that what college is for? Seems to me there are many more non-academic things kids should be spending their time doing during their high school years.