In the winter of 2018, high school basketball standout Greg Whitesell and his team, the Arlee Warriors, felt uncommon pressure to win. For division finals they would play Manhattan Christian, a private school whose team sported new uniforms each year and traveled in private coaches, not school buses. They were white, taller, better fed. The Warriors had beaten them for the 2017 Montana Class C Division title and planned to do it again in 2018. But the Arlee Warriors labored under a weight the private school did not. Between November 2016 and November 2017, twenty people had died by suicide on the Flathead Indian Reservation. A few teenagers died in the fall of 2016, but that wasn’t what the community considered the beginning. In the winter of 2017, Roberta Hayes, a foster mother to a houseful of children, a tribal policeman’s wife and pillar of Arlee, took her own life. Her death was more than a shock to the team, it was a roundhouse punch. Many of the Warriors, including Greg, called her Auntie, a term of affection for women not related by blood.
It turned out Roberta’s death was just the beginning. It was as if a starting gun had gone off in a suicide race.
In April, a former Warrior killed himself, and days later a teen who attended his funeral shot himself but survived. Most Warriors knew both boys intimately. Then the suicides came like clockwork.
Suicide contagion, a particularly frightening facet of suicide, takes some unpacking. Suicide experts define contagion as the transmission of suicidal behavior from one person to another, like an infectious disease. By many accounts, one person with a problem, often depression, sees another person with the same problem who is struggling. That person chooses suicide. Since we learn much of our behavior by modeling the behavior of people around us, especially those of higher status or whom we admire, suicide is then seen as an acceptable way to deal with the problem. And the problem is pain. Pain is the dominant theme of every conversation I’ve had with people who have attempted suicide, and those who knew someone who has killed themselves. Psychological pain is a suicide stressor most experts agree on. It is the main why of suicide.
“The people who die by suicide want out of the pain. They want the pain to end and nothing has worked to help them end that pain.” Dan Reidenberg, PsyD, is a psychologist and former executive director of Suicide Awareness Voices of Education (SAVE). After more than thirty years of helping those in pain, Dr. Reidenberg has developed a nuanced appreciation for the mental suffering of people who are suicidal.
“The reason it’s difficult to understand the level of pain is actually a protective factor for all of us. Because, in fact, if we all felt that level of pain, we’d all be at that same level of risk for suicide. That is what tells us the pain is immense. It is that unbearable anguish, it is beyond what anybody can handle. So it’s not just about you get punched in the gut, it’s not just about you’ve lost everything in the world. It’s about that magnified a hundred times and a thousand times beyond that.
“Imagine if you had a headache, you’d get through a headache. Imagine if you had a migraine headache, which is debilitating for a lot of people, you might stay home from work, you might not be able to function very well with a migraine, but you can get through it. Imagine having a migraine headache and having a jackhammer outside of your room for an hour and then imagine that jackhammer hammering on your head for an hour. Now multiply that by ten and that’s the pain.”
This pain applies not just to the original suicide victim but to those who follow their deadly example. Suicide prevention expert Christine Moutier began focusing her psychiatry career on suicide after physician trainees and colleagues in medical school died by suicide. Now she’s the chief medical officer of the nation’s most prominent suicide reduction organization, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. She’s quick to point out that people who die following suicide contagion don’t kill themselves just because someone else did.
“When a person is exposed to another person’s suicidal behavior or death, it can connect to their own sense of suicide, being a solution to the pain that they’re in. But they are probably at risk to begin with.”
In other words, victims of suicide contagion are usually suicidal before someone else models a “solution” to their pain. Usually, they know the person who killed themselves and come from emotionally and geographically close communities. The closeness to family and community found in Native populations should be a protective force; however, it can undermine safety if individuals come to believe that suicide is a normal, accepted behavior among their peers.
Victims of contagion often share adversities that exacerbate their thoughts about suicide. On the Flathead Indian Reservation, those include depression and drug and alcohol abuse, as well as sources of stress like broken families, unemployment and poverty, and the historical trauma of violent colonization.
Natives have inhabited this part of Montana for upward of 14,000 years. The reservation was born in strife. In 1855 the 2,000-square-mile Flathead Indian Reservation was created by a treaty with a familiar plot—to seize land from Natives in exchange for less land and some cash. The US government immediately reneged and opened the reservation, complete with grants of land, to white settlers. Today, Natives describe the region, an hour north of Missoula, as a checkerboard. A right-hand turn will put you on the reservation—technically a sovereign nation—but a left will take you back to the USA. Today, towns virtually adjoining Arlee are all white, while Arlee is mixed.
Suicide should also be included in this list of adversities affecting the reservation; it’s an all-too-common crisis in many Native communities. In 2019, Montana ranked third in the number of suicides per capita in the United States. Natives led that list with 31.39 suicides per 10,000 people, which is almost three times the national average. Before the 2016–17 suicides began, the region had already suffered more than its share. Over the prior decade, suicide was the number one cause of preventable death for children between ten and fourteen in Flathead County. After the cluster, in 2018, 11.7 percent of seventh- and eighth-grade students and 12.19 percent of ninth- through twelfth-grade students made one or more suicide attempts.
For suicide contagion to occur, personally knowing the first victim isn’t necessary. In 2014, after beloved comedian Robin Williams killed himself, strangers across the country followed suit. David Fink, PhD, MPH, and colleagues at Columbia University found a 10 percent increase in suicides in the United States in the months following Williams’s death. The deaths were concentrated in middle-aged men like Williams. Many copied his means of suicide. A large case of contagion like that, influenced by the media, is called a mass cluster.
The deaths following Robin Williams’s suicide highlighted failures in media reporting. The internet is a rich source of best practices for handling suicide in print and broadcast media, recommendations that can help avoid suicide contagion and save lives. Yet many media professionals ignore this readily available advice. One of the best information sources for media can be found at reportingonsuicide.org. In Robin Williams’s case, reporters broke cardinal rules: describing the place and means of suicide, speculating about motives, glamorizing the victim, displaying sensationalized headlines, and more. It’s wrong, in essence, to describe how famous people kill themselves, because others may copy it. It’s wrong to make suicide seem like an effective, desirable source of attention.
Instead, it’s important to follow a few rules that help reporters deal with suicide as a public health issue in a complete and meaningful way. Some of these include keeping information about the location and means of suicide general; using language that is sensitive to the grieving family; describing risk factors and warning signs for suicide; reporting that many kinds of treatment are effective for most people who have suicidal thoughts; and including information about the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
Though it was a fictional series and not news reporting, the creators and broadcaster of the Netflix drama 13 Reasons Why ignored best practices, and their neglect may have cost lives. In the series, a high school girl leaves thirteen tape recordings explaining her suicide. The series depicts bullying, violent rape, sexual assault, and suicide. Its heroine blames others for actions or inactions that led to her death. What’s more, her high school guidance counselor dismisses her suicidal thoughts and seems to blame her for instances of sexual assault.
Dan Reidenberg reflects the concerns the suicide-prevention community has about the series. Besides sending dangerous messages, the series, like the book it was based on, is aimed at teenagers, who are the most at risk for suicide contagion. Reidenberg says, “Young people are not that great at separating fiction from reality. That gets even harder to do when you’re struggling with suicidal thoughts.” But it was young people who were targeted by the series and young people who were harmed.
According to a study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry—with contributions from several universities and the National Institute of Mental Health—the series was associated with a 28.9 percent increase in suicide rates among US people ages ten to seventeen in the month after its release.
In the study of suicide, the concepts of contagion and cluster are closely linked. A group of suicides, like the 2016–17 Flathead Indian Reservation cluster, that occur within a contained space and time are called a point cluster. Christine Moutier says that a point cluster exceeds the usual baseline rates of suicides in an area, and “youth are more susceptible to contagion when it comes to suicide risk.” The Flathead cluster had a broader than usual demographic. The National Indian Health Board reported that during the cluster, “Native youth under the age of 18 and ages 18–24 accounted for 34% of the suicides….”
Indigenous communities have the highest suicide rate of any ethnic group in the United States; it’s not surprising that they are frequent settings for suicide clusters. During the 2009–10 school year, leaders at Fort Peck Reservation in northwest Montana reported that five children killed themselves and twenty more attempted suicide. In 2019, officials at Fort Belknap Reservation, near Montana’s Canadian border, declared a cluster with some twenty deaths and at least fifteen attempts, most among middle and high school students. Across the United States, teen suicides ravage Native populations with grim regularity. Between 2009 and 2011 a reservation in New Mexico and one in Alaska together lost twenty-five young people to suicide with at least twenty-seven other attempts. At Fort Apache Reservation in northeastern Arizona, forty-one Apache tribal members died of suicide from 2001 to 2006. From 2006 to 2012, twenty-nine more died.
Clusters are not restricted to Natives. Between 1966 and 1988, point clusters of non-Native suicides occurred in communities in California, Virginia, Wyoming, two cities in Texas, three counties in New York, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New Jersey, Nebraska, Colorado, and South Dakota.
Patty Stevens and her husband, Billy, own a ranch house and several sprawling acres along Mission Creek, beneath the towering glacier-capped Mission Mountain Range, about fifteen miles north of Arlee. The first time I met Patty, an injured great horned owl was hunkered down beside the creek. Before we could call wildlife officials, it hoisted itself into the air, broken leg dangling, and flapped downstream. “That’s a bad sign,” said Patty, not about the broken leg but about the owl turning up on the day of a powwow. In some Native traditions, owls are connected to night and the underworld. Some consider owls to be the restless spirits of the dead.
In middle age, Patty is an attorney, a former prosecutor, a child welfare court witness, and an active member of the Tribal Council of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. She is woven into tribal and community affairs like a bright band in a traditional blanket. In addition to her official roles, she’s an aunt, a grandmother, and a foster mom to a houseful of kids, teens and younger. With alcohol and drug abuse rife on the reservation, life is tough on families, and intact families are rare. When a child lacks a meal or a bed, I learned, he or she is quickly gathered up into one of the reservation’s extended families. If fate drops you into Patty and Billy’s life, you are lucky indeed.
Traditionally, a powwow is a large regional gathering that features feasting, music, and dancing. With just fifty adults and children attending, Patty and Billy’s was more intimate. It was the first powwow of any kind to take place after the COVID pandemic, when public gatherings were all but forbidden. And it was one of the first to follow the end of the suicide cluster, in 2017. Although in 2021 when I mentioned that the cluster was over to Anna Whiting Sorrell, MPA, a health official in charge of tribal response to the suicides, and a close friend of Patty’s, she said in earnest, “Is it over?”
Her remark told me that the cluster—twenty suicides in a two-year span—was not far from the norm. Average numbers for the Flathead Indian Reservation are not available, but for Flathead County, which contains parts of the reservation, they were even higher, suffering on average twenty-six suicides a year between 2018 and 2020.
At one end of the compound a group of muscular men carved out a thirty-foot-long cedar tree to create a traditional dugout canoe. Nearby, smoked brisket cooled on trays, making mouths water. Across the compound stood an assemblage of teepees, where children and teens prepared their ornate costumes, called regalia, for traditional dancing. At a picnic table in the shade of a pine tree beside Mission Creek, Patty led a group of seven women and teenage girls in making moccasins.
Patty said to the heavens, “Thank you, Creator, for bringing us all together today to make some moccasins.” To the moccasin makers, “When we do something like this, we have to do it with really good hearts and good thoughts on our mind because I kid you not, if you start making a design like this and you start thinking thoughts about somebody that aren’t very nice, your needle makes knots in about thirty seconds. So have some good thoughts. Good medicine!”
For young people, making moccasins is part of their introduction to their culture. For older women the craft is a traditional way to share thoughts among themselves, away from men. Today’s thoughts were about the souls lost during the suicide cluster. Kimberly Swaney, a middle-aged Native woman with a shock of gray-and-white hair and a commanding, gravelly voice, fearlessly launched into her story. She had first endured the grief of suicide when her father killed himself.
“I was probably about ten or twelve when I began to get the understanding that my dad wasn’t there because he chose not to be. Because he took his own life.”
Her next suicide was just four years ago, the victim her fifty-nine-year-old boyfriend.
“Dave was bipolar and, you know, the Creator put him in our life because he needed to be happy for at least short time. I can remember him saying ‘This is the happiest I’ve ever been.’ And he got to experience what it was like to live in an Indian community even though he wasn’t an Indian. But when he didn’t take his medicine, he just got to be impossible to deal with.”
Dave wasn’t unusual in the way he died. Suicide results from a mix of causes that are usually different from one person to another. But one factor is present at least 90 percent of the time: a mental health condition, which most of the time is not being treated. Depression, substance abuse disorder, and psychosis lead the way. However, it is important to note that the vast majority of people with mental health conditions do not die by their own hand.
Christine Moutier adds, “There are other risk factors as well, things that relate to impulsivity, aggression, experiences from the past—adversity, trauma, abuse. So it is really important to understand that suicide has multiple risk factors that converge, that come together, and it’s not really ever going to be one issue that causes suicide.”
Sometimes in dramas or novels, one very bad event—typically a romantic breakup—can propel someone to kill themselves. Think Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Impulsive, one-trigger suicides occur, but they are rare. More commonly a cascade of risk factors comes together. For example, in the United States, alcohol, a common risk factor for suicide, is present in the blood of male suicide victims on average 30 percent of the time, and in some states much higher. Add alcohol abuse to a breakup and the loss of a job. Later perhaps the victim is forced to leave their home. And, let’s say, she has a history of suicides in her family, and is understandably depressed about the state of her life.
Dave cycled up and down, ecstatically happy one day and sad and quarrelsome the next. After months of instability, which impacted a household made up of other adults and some children, Kimberly called a state hotline that offered one-time emergency counseling. But its staffers would not even provide advice—they insisted that Dave had to make the call. A local health clinic was available to help Dave, but he refused to go to them, and their waiting list for counseling was months long anyway.
One day, Dave had a particularly heated argument with Kimberly’s daughter. The two were always at one another. For Kimberly, it was one fight too many. On her way to work she called the tribal police. “You need to go get him,” she said. They could take him to a hospital where he’d get a night to cool off and perhaps some treatment. The tribal police visited Dave and determined, without benefit of a psychological evaluation, that he wasn’t a threat to anyone. They told Kimberly, “He’s fine.” She paused in her story to wipe away tears. That afternoon she and her daughter drove home from work. She said, “It was January thirteenth, there was snow on the ground. And I could tell from the tracks in the snow that he had never left the house. I told my daughter to stay in the car. Dave had locked the door, but I managed to get in and I walked down the hall, checking all the rooms.”
She found him in their bedroom. Dave had taken his life. She told her daughter to call 911 and keep her grandchildren from going inside when they returned from school. When the tribal police showed up, they didn’t want to enter the home. Frightened and superstitious, they left it to Kimberly and a neighbor to cut Dave down.
Throughout David’s final ordeal, no coordination occurred among the staff of the hotline, the clinic, and the tribal police. They were the only resources available, but they came from three unconnected jurisdictions. Those seeking help for a suicidal crisis face similar problems across the country.
At this point in the story a young woman holding a smoking bundle of sage wafted it around the table of moccasin makers. It smelled earthy and strong, like pine and herbs. This sacred ritual, called smudging, links smoke to spirituality. It is said to rid spaces of negative energy, and even carry prayers to the spirit world.
Smudging played a part in Kimberly’s survival after Dave’s suicide. The most potent support came from traditional holy men and women who gave her house a cleansing smudge.
Kimberly said, “I’m just fortunate though that I had Kootenai medicine people around me the entire time and Salish medicine people who really watched out for me and my family and they took care of my house. They cleaned it of leftover energy. We made sure we gathered Dave’s things so that he had no reason to come back. I wanted him to have a safe journey because he deserved that.”
Engrossed in Kimberly’s story, Patty and the moccasin makers had put aside their materials. Patty got back into action and showed her granddaughter Erica how to trace her foot on brown paper and then draw a simple design, including holes for laces, around the footprint. Later she’d trace the paper on buckskin, then cut and sew.
Across the compound, drumming began, and sporadic chanting. There would be feasting soon, and the dancers would take their places.
Michelle Matt, a large woman wearing a beautiful yellow dress with matching butterfly earrings, had opted out of the moccasin activity but listened closely to Kimberly’s story. She worked up the nerve to tell her own.
Her younger brother John was a gentle man prone to depression and addiction. He used marijuana and methamphetamine and frequently changed jobs. November 21 had been John’s birthday and he had recently finished a stint at a drug rehabilitation clinic. The family celebrated with dinner at their favorite restaurant, Famous Dave’s, then saw a movie. At his mother’s house the next day, John danced and prayed for snow. Michelle said, “My mom and him were snow people, they loved snow. And they knew winter dances were coming and that was their favorite time of the year.”
But just as in Kimberly’s story, everything turned on an argument. John and his best friend, who had been living with John and his mother, got into a bitter quarrel. John stormed out into the night. As Michelle told me, her mother phoned her. “ ‘You need to pray hard,’ Mom says. ‘Your brother’s not doing good and he left the house.’ I said, ‘Well, did he have a gun or anything?’ And she said, ‘No. I don’t think so.’ Well, the next day was Sunday, we were gonna go to church. Mom said, ‘I’m not gonna go to church. He never come home.’ ”
This had not been the first anxious morning caused by her kind but unpredictable brother. Michelle feared the worst.
“So we get home, I go and I drive around hoping my brother was maybe walking to my house from the mountains. And um, nothing. I go to Mom’s house. I said, ‘Anything yet?’ We tried calling him. Nothing.”
Next, Michelle phoned a friend and asked him to look for John in the hills behind her mother’s house. Michelle said, “And it was really weird for him. He said he was driving up behind the house and he saw my brother walking. He got out and he yelled, ‘John, where are you going? Where are you going, John?’ And John, he said, kept walking. And he kept following him. But when he got there, my brother was already dead.”
John killed himself with his rifle, a tool present in every Native home for keeping the freezer full of deer and elk throughout the year. He had been dead all night.
A woman handed Michelle a tissue. Her face folded into grief and her voice keened with pain. “I got there and I walked up to where he shot himself, and I tell you what. That moment I saw him was it just hurt. It hurt so bad.” Michelle hit her chest with a fist as her agony erupted in a wail. The moccasin makers put down their work again. “Oh God. It was awful! And at that moment, I just knew I was losing both of them. I just knew my mom and my brother were both gonna leave me and my family was gonna be torn apart.”
Because of the endless whys—why was he in so much pain, why did he have to perform this irreversible act, why couldn’t his family stop what was happening?—grief from suicide is especially difficult. Suicide survivors and those near them should be conscious of its different phases and learn what to expect. Those closest to the victim may first experience what’s called acute grief, the initial painful response, characterized by shock, disbelief, and blame, as well as the impact of stigma and trauma.
Accompanying the torment will be an unwelcome flood of logistics—paying hospital bills, arranging funerals, notifying relatives, disposing of property, and much more. If the survivor is lucky, acute grief will resolve within several months into integrated grief, or adapting to the loved one’s death. Survivors return to their lives, to work, and will be able to discuss the loss of their loved one without breaking down. Though grief will linger, life will resume. I’ve heard more than one suicide survivor say, paradoxically, “I didn’t survive. I endured.” Most people do endure. They find things to keep their minds off their loss. And with this endurance can come newfound strengths, and new and important relationships.
The third horseman of the apocalypse of sorrow is complicated grief. This has all the symptoms of acute grief, but it’s not temporary; it moves in to stay. The anguish of the bereaved does not abate. Integration of the death into the rest of the survivor’s life, and healing, do not occur. Tragically, the survivor may yearn to join their missing loved one in death. Their own death may seem like the sole path of relief available to them.
John’s suicide was one of the first in the Flathead Indian Reservation cluster. Within a month, Michelle’s mother died too. Michelle said, “People can will themselves to go. My mom did. When I had to sit there, I’d be so mad. I said, ‘Mom, you gotta eat. You can’t leave now.’ I just laid in bed holding her until she died. I knew she was going to be with my brother so it wasn’t as hard as my brother, but that pain was still there.”
People who were close to someone who died by suicide within the last year are 3.7 times more likely than average to make a suicide attempt. They’re also 1.6 times more likely to have persistent thoughts about suicide and 2.9 times more likely to make a plan for dying by suicide. Relatives and friends of loved ones who have suffered this kind of loss must monitor them closely. At the powwow, I spoke with Patty’s granddaughter Erica, a raven-haired nineteen-year-old whose father had killed himself during the peak of the cluster. She told me she thinks about suicide all the time, and the only reason she stays alive is because she knows how much her death would hurt her family. She said something I would hear from coast to coast in the United States.
“Might as well just die,” she told me. “If you’re not rich you might as well just die.”
For suicide attempters or those with suicidal thoughts, most emergency departments will observe them for a night or two. During that time a doctor or nurse may ask if they have plans for suicide, then cut them loose with a referral to a therapist. One problem with this approach is that people who are intent on dying by suicide will say whatever is necessary to gain their freedom and try again. The biggest single indicator of a suicide attempt is a prior suicide attempt. Another problem is if you don’t have insurance or if your insurance doesn’t cover psychological counseling, you may not be able to afford the referred therapist. And if the therapist comes at no cost, like a handful in Arlee, you will wait months or more for an appointment. On and around the reservation the cost of therapy is prohibitive, so many like Erica who desperately need mental health therapy have one option: wait for months for an appointment with a local, free counselor. In the United States this is the rule, not the exception.
Within a year of her brother John’s death, one of Michelle’s uncles killed himself and a nephew attempted suicide but survived. It seems likely these acts were connected to John’s suicide. But by then the whole Flathead Indian Reservation was in the throes of the cluster.
Amid all the talk of dying and suicide’s ongoing presence on the reservation, I found myself questioning Patty and Billy’s decision to host a traditional celebration, a powwow. But, as we’ll discuss ahead, investing in traditional crafts and music, and sharing stories, is not a luxury at all but a necessity in the face of suicide.
Greg Whitesell was short for a basketball player, just five feet seven, with another two inches added by bleached blond curls that disappeared into a brown fade. He had an open, impish face on the brink of a smile, an athletic, rangy body that could defy gravity, and an irrepressible love of riddles. In the first video clip I ever saw of him, he asked an off-screen teammate, “What do you call a guy with a rubber toe?” The player didn’t know. “Roberto,” Greg said, to an audible groan.
Greg was a two-sport athlete, great at basketball but also a standout wide receiver on the Warriors football team. For schools as small as Arlee High, full participation in sports is almost a requirement of students, boys and girls alike. Otherwise many sports would have too few players to field a team. During a football game in the fall of 2016, Greg suffered a bruising tackle and a concussion. It wasn’t his first. His mother, Raelena Whitesell, an optician and mother of five, told me, “Greg’s had many concussions through football, basketball, but the doctors would say, ‘Okay, you know, let’s let him rest.’ Then he would get released but you know as a mom I would always be afraid, scared.”
Coach Zanen Pitts, a wiry thirtysomething horse and buffalo rancher, dog breeder, boot-and-hat-wearing cowboy, noticed a change in Greg’s mood right away. “When Greg got the head injury, it put him into a state of depression in a really bad way. He always has been a person that can get kind of emotional. He can get really aggressive and really timid in drastic extremes pretty quickly. But he also is super caring and super loving.”
Still, to Greg’s mom, her son seemed fine. “I didn’t know he was depressed. I should have seen the signs because he was always in his room and just kept to himself, but I didn’t think anything of it—you know, I thought ‘Oh, he’s a teenager, just going through it.’ ”
Greg was displaying signs of distress and perhaps suicidal ideation. Some signs were apparent to his friends and supporters, some flew under the radar, even for his mother. They included more intense mood swings than usual, self-isolation, loss of appetite, depression, and insomnia. And suicide was all around him. According to his own estimate, by the winter of 2016 he knew five people on the reservation who had taken their own lives. It would be safe to say everyone knew someone who had become infected by the deadly contagion sweeping through the community. The victims were dear friends and neighbors. Parents. Schoolmates. Who wouldn’t be knocked over by such tragic news day after day?
Now add to Greg’s stressors a possible brain injury. Greg had a history of concussions, in addition to the recent one. Athletes, particularly football players, have lots to fear from brain injuries.
John Mann, MD, PhD, is a professor of translational neuroscience in the Departments of Psychiatry and Radiology at Columbia University. As a neuroscientist, Dr. Mann looks into the brain for suicide’s causes and cures. Speaking of football, he says, “Every time you see the offensive and defensive line collide, they get a hit from the front. The brain rocks back and forwards on the brain stem and bangs the front of the brain against the skull on the front, and the back of the brain against the back. And it rocks, ‘Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom.’ Because they’re now so athletic, so fast and so powerful, those hits are much worse than they used to be.”
The damage is concentrated in the front. “And the front of the brain is involved in mood regulation and in decision-making. So the result is, you have a person who is more likely to act impulsively on decisions and go with their emotions. At the same time, their emotions are now out of control. So they’re more likely to experience more extremes of emotion, like depression and distress.”
Greg’s depression was compounded by a piercing loneliness. Though he had an extensive group of friends and supporters, they were no bulwark against his pain. As he described it, “Lonely. Really lonely, like I knew I had a lot of people on my side, I knew I had a lot of people that cared. But, when you’re depressed, man, the only thing you can think about is yourself, and the only thing you can think about is, you know, what’s killing you and what’s eating you up inside. I did have a lot of people there for me but I was just pushing them away, not even giving them a chance.”
Greg developed thoughts of killing himself.
Anna Whiting Sorrell is an outspoken member of the Salish community who has held distinguished positions in public health, including a job as the head of public health for the state of Montana. She was a consultant for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes Tribal Health Department in Arlee from 2014 through 2018, which put her on the front lines of the response to the suicide cluster. In a conversation at Arlee High school, we hit on the subject of Greg Whitesell.
“Suicide is so prevalent that I wasn’t surprised,” she said. “Was I devastated? Absolutely. Did I wanna cry? I could cry now thinking about that, because he should have been protected from it. He comes from a great family. He was, you know, this successful basketball player. My husband and I have been in this gymnasium watching him play, and he was my favorite.”
Sorrell’s lament echoes the heartache that accompanies teen suicides everywhere. Sometimes it seems as if talented and driven adolescents take their own lives more frequently than others. Or maybe it’s that their suicides draw more attention than those of less prominent peers. Experts claim that while the United States does a good job keeping statistics on suicide deaths, giftedness is not a variable that is tracked. But anecdotal evidence is plentiful. From 2011 to 2014 at W. T. Woodson High School in Fairfax, Virginia, six students killed themselves. Officials looked for commonalities and found them. Each came from a stable family, earned good grades, and excelled at sports. The grieving community protested that these students should have been the least likely to harm themselves. But scientists point out that gifted adolescents may be more vulnerable because of the qualities that make them standouts, including perfectionism, competitive drive, self-reliance, and hypersensitivity to criticism. Their go-it-alone style can become too rigid, their mistakes unbearably shameful to them.
Based on journals he has read from gifted teens who died by suicide, William and Mary University professor Tracy Cross, PhD, developed a theory about their high rates: gifted teens may be better at planning and executing their suicides than others, and so accomplish them more often.
In late 2016, on a winter night in the tidy clapboard house he shared with his mother, Greg Whitesell sat alone in his room, unable to sleep. Team posters and photographs covered the walls. In his bedroom closet was his hunting rifle. Outside, a howling blizzard battered the windows and front porch with fusillades of snow. Around midnight, Greg sent a text, which reached his two closest friends on the basketball team. It consisted of one sentence.
“I don’t want to be here anymore.” Then Greg turned off his phone.
Experts say that when teens are suffering, they are more likely to confide their feelings to their friends than to adults, even their parents. Peers have a unique opportunity to step in and make a difference. The two young men tried to reach Greg but got no answer. Minutes later they were racing through the blizzard in an old pickup truck.
As Greg was preparing to kill himself.