PREFACE

TRACY L. CROSS

Although I have been somewhat aware of suicide since childhood, I have not been preoccupied with it or even particularly focused on it. I suspect that my longstanding interest in music and art have kept me close to people in two arenas wherein suicidal behavior has higher prevalence rates than average (Ludwig, 1995). I have also had numerous friends and acquaintances from the LGBTQ community, another group at higher than average risk for suicidal behavior. The single thread across my life is that I grew up surrounded by gifted and talented people. As I matured, I worried about some of my friends and acquaintances, as, occasionally, one would engage in suicidal ideation or make a suicide attempt. These experiences set the stage for my midcareer focus on the suicidal behavior of students with gifts and talents.

In April of 1994, while I was watching MTV News, I learned of the suicide of the alternative band Nirvana’s singer-songwriter Kurt Cobain. I realized that we had lost an important musician and leader of disenfranchised youth. I feared that there would likely be a pronounced effect on the Cobain followers. For several months prior to Cobain’s death, I had been involved in a yearlong evaluation of a residential high school for intellectually gifted students (Academy). Within a couple of weeks of Cobain’s death, I was contacted by the dean of the college of education that administered the Academy and was apprised that it was prom night and there had been a suicide within the school’s student body. I also learned that the suicide had occurred one block away from the Academy’s campus. I met the dean at the Academy to help, prior to his informing the students what had happened. The dean had the very difficult responsibility of telling the students, during their prom, about the suicide of one of their popular student leaders.

I learned that same evening that a former student of the same school had killed himself a few months before while in a mental health institution. This student had been sent home from the school following a brief period of attendance, after a series of inappropriate behaviors were documented. The student spent a month in a mental health facility, came home for one day, was returned to the mental health facility, and later hanged himself in the facility. The school learned after his death that he had a long history of mental health problems and had made several attempts to kill himself before he attended the Academy. None of this information was shared with the Academy until after his death.

A task force was created by the dean to: (a) conduct a postvention, (b) prevent another suicide, and, (c) study the suicides at the school. A postvention is a plan to enter an environment after a tragedy or crisis and help ease the pain of those in the environment. Services were provided to students, families, and some faculty and staff after determining the extent to which individual community members were at risk. Postventions also attempt to prevent suicide contagion from occurring. To those ends, all students who were designated as at risk were attended to personally and over time. During the following summer months, a third student associated with the school killed himself at his original home high school. His suicidal journal entry is included at the beginning of the first chapter of this book. He was the third student who had attended the Academy for some period of time who had died by his own hand. In the ensuing 23 years, no additional suicides have occurred among students attending the Academy.

These three suicides required intensive, long-term study to understand. Three psychological autopsies were conducted, culminating in a special issue of the Journal of Secondary Gifted Education in 1996. Considerable study of the school environment was also undertaken before, during, and after the postvention. Eighteen months after the third suicide occurred, the dean asked me to take over the Academy as its Executive Director. Several policies had been changed as a function of the task force recommendations, including hiring a full-time clinical psychologist to work in the school. I was asked to stay as Executive Director of the school for a semester to try to calm the employees of the school, as the university’s board of trustees was scheduled to vote on whether to shut the school down. Their concerns included both the suicides and a high level of acrimony that existed between the faculty and the Academy’s administration. I ended up staying at the Academy for approximately 9 years, with my primary objective being the students’ mental well-being.

CONFLUENCE OF EVENTS

I was trained as an educational psychologist and a school psychologist with a background in counseling, a passion in neuropsychology, and a focus on adolescents and gifted students. Over time, my specialty became the psychology of students with gifts and talents. Most of my research over the past 33 years has been focused in this area. Topics such as social coping, lived experience, and stigma of giftedness established the foundation for my shift to studying suicidal behavior. During this 30+ year period, I have run programs and a residential high school for gifted students and founded the Center for Gifted Studies and Talent Development and the Institute for Research on the Psychology of Gifted Students at Ball State University (BSU). Currently, I serve as Executive Director of the Center for Gifted Education at William & Mary, where I hold an endowed chair entitled The Jody and Layton Smith Professor of Psychology and Gifted Education. For 10 years prior to my stint at William & Mary, I served BSU as the George and Frances Ball Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Gifted Studies. I recently created the Institute for Research on the Suicide of Gifted Students at William & Mary.

Since beginning the psychological autopsies in 1994, I have focused much of my research on the suicidal behavior of students who are gifted and talented. I have written numerous articles and book chapters and made a multitude of presentations, all leading up to this book. This book is intended to provide an easy-to-read compilation of research that applies to the suicidal behavior of school-aged children and adolescents. More specifically, the book emphasizes the school as the context for observing students with gifts and talents. School is the single location that brings together teachers, counselors, administrators, and parents with the potential for monitoring and preventing suicide. Schools provide windows into the lives of students in ways that do not exist otherwise. For example, students develop patterns of behavior that foretell problems. Friendships, frustrations, relationships, alcohol and/or drug use, and academic achievement can all be monitored and interventions can be put in place before these lead to the death of a student.

An important second reason for placing the school at the center of this work is because it allows for four groups of adults (teachers, counselors, administrators, and parents), and others as need be, to collaborate for the best interest of the child. Parents have a good sense of their children, and often overhear things said by their children’s friends. Teachers see changes in achievement and friendships and examples of bullying. Counselors often get brought in when there is a problem (although for some gifted students, teachers and counselors become their friends). Counselors also have training about social and emotional development that is quite valuable, plus many of the predictable issues of students with gifts and talents are related to topics about which the counselors are knowledgeable. Administrators tend to see a big picture that includes patterns, tendencies, and structures that are salient to the topic of creating a healthy school environment. Combined, this group makes for a powerful and informed force working to prevent suicide among students with gifts and talents. It is my hope that this book might help us prevent suicide among this population and any other children with whom we have contact.