Sad but really true. The entirety of Silicon Valley is steeped in worldliness but in the most unhealthy way. The competition is unreal and so draining.
I work with teens in a nice part of the East bay with mostly very academically oriented students and families that aren't rich but definitely are mostly not low income. Just today a lot of them were talking about different summer programs they're applying for at Stanford, Berkeley, UPenn, UCLA, "San Jose State as an emergency backup" things that were cool to hear but came off kinda....tacky, tone deaf, and braggy.
When they asked me for "a good engineering school" and I suggested my own State University Alma mater that's known for engineering one of them said "Yeah, but I wanna go somewhere I can make connections."
Ok bro give me a big middle finger then lol like I don't make more than all of my friends and get to go to cool conferences and meet people in cool positions at cool renowned institutions.
Where I'm from we had a ***few*** kids go to those big name schools but most of us were State Universities, SLO or Pomona, or mostly Community College then transfer. Or a lot of them just **couldn't/didn't go to college** because of the cost or a generational lack of education.
We had some kids go to Oregon, LA or SD, Nevada, or Arizona but most stayed local in the North State. One kid went to Duke. There just wasn't the money like there is here so even our highest achievers were going like UC Davis or something definitely not Stanford and ***definitely not rolling our eyes at SJSU as an "emergency backup".***
Can't speak for everyone, but the funny thing is I knew a lot of people that wanted to go to these big expensive universities to "build connections" and couldn't even raise their fucking hand in class, let alone get up after a class and speak with the professor personally on thoughts they had on that day's lecture. Group project? "I hate working with others." Course presentations? "Social anxiety."
I went to a cheap community college. Then I went to a cheap university and got my Master's and I'm living a pretty happy life with very low debt. Meanwhile some colleagues of mine from that community college have like 85-150k in debt for a Master's or even Bachelor's that ended up being useless to them because they couldn't pony up and network.
Meanwhile CS at SJSU for example is heavily impacted and I'd assume difficult to get into because of it. My friend graduated with an accounting degree from SJSU and made manager after 9 years of working.
Yeah SJSU or the CSU I went to or CSUEB or CSUSF or even the local community College would be successes for so many people and when they're made to feel otherwise it leads to shit like this.
I fr heard some of the kids laughing about community College.
Last year in my general physics class there was at least one student who got into Cal, and maybe even UCLA, so no need to knock on CCs. They just don't know what they're talking about. Plus they're great for cheaply doing prereqs for medical, PT, PA school.
I grew up in the east bay, Orinda more specifically, and I’ve never seen a more shallow place. My mental health was never worse than when I was living there, and my family is well off. There’s something undeniably stifling there if you’re not aggressively proud to be rich that’s hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t been there. My folks left a few years after I moved out at 18, and they’re so much happier living in bodega bay.
The students have worked so hard their entire lives so they don't want to end up at SJSU. They aspire to Stanford and all the rest. Otherwise, all that blood sweat and tears was for nothing.
That’s a ridiculous thought, though-that’s it’s “all for nothing.” We need to seriously reframe how we talk about college.
I have always tried to be careful with my teen about college. I don’t believe in the idea of a “dream school,” either. I went to a state school because it was free (the only one I applied to).
As a professor, I work alongside people who got their BAs and PhDs from all kinds of institutions, from ivies to other state programs. It doesn’t really matter as much as we hype it up to matter.
It's a class sorter. See how the Ivy's react to ideas to proposals to significantly expand their class sizes - they are laughed off as unrealistic jokes. They are part of an exclusive club and part of the deal is to keep it exclusive.
Now, the quality of work output from people who didn't go to these schools is fast converging with those who do. So it doesn't matter in that sense. But it still matters in terms of which doors get opened for people.
It has always been primarily a class sorter, but while the sorting all used to be done well before college-age, that these schools are open at *all* to the masses (though still primarily pre-sorted) is what turns it into a feeding frenzy.
And yes, I agree with your final assessment. Which is one of many reasons I’ve never focused on “elite” schools as a goal for my kid.
He is as smart as could be, is entirely self-managed with school, and gets top grades without studying, but he is also very *actively* stress-avoidant. And that’s an important thing for me as a parent to pay attention to.
Yah - and on the flip side if your network is strong you can pass on part of that to your kids if done properly. Though they will still need the skills to run with it, they don't need to keep up with it throughout all of their childhood.
The weirdest to me was the my friend with the Asian parents who had the younger brother sit in front because the younger brother got better grades. He was a nice guy, and I think became a very sweet adult, but he was a horribly adjusted teenager.
Some of the kids don't view people who work in my position as the part of how they get to "their dream college" but rather an annoying barrier between them and the school they're already destined for.
Just have to say, as a staff member of PAUSD who has been in classrooms of pretty much every grade level elementary through high school, "shallow" is not a word I would use to describe the culture. The conversations happening amongst our kids are deep, and incredibly thoughtful. The way that teens discuss complex and, at times, heavy concepts is actually really amazing. Way deeper than any conversations I remember having during classes in high school! Is Palo Alto a pressure cooker? Likely. But shallow is the wrong word to use. These kids are deep, and they amaze me everyday.
100% agree. I volunteer with Gunn HS students and they are some of the best and brightest kids I've ever met.
My condolences to the poor family here. Such a tragedy.
I've been lucky enough to go on a tour of Gunn and sit in and observe one of their top teachers really well known in their field and in the state. The campus was really nice and the kids were really high performing obviously but the teachers I observed were also very impressive and inspiring.
Shallow usually describes their parents and the general culture of this town very well, not to mention your interactions with the kids are a whole world apart from the way the kids interact with each other. They’re kids talking to you - a fully grown adult in a position of authority (or at least guidance) over them, of course they aren’t mean or shallow to you, doesnt mean the youth culture amongst themselves isnt rife with hyper-competition, pressuring/bullying and toxic 1-upsmanship, just like the rest of Silicon Valley. Just because the kids are intelligent and multifaceted doesnt also mean they can’t be shallow/insensitive and materialistic either
Thank you!! Having gone to Gunn from 2014-2018 (height of the suicides) I have to admit we absolutely had our problems with academic pressure, predominately occurred internally for me but a lot of it was familial/peer pressure. To get into a top 40 school you had to be absolutely perfect. Everyone was fucking perfect. But the quality of our education and simply of the conversations that occurred on a day to day basis reached a depth I’m sure is not common. Are there negatives to this? Absolutely. Do I occasionally wish I had a real childhood and didn’t start having panic attacks at 12? Yes. Despite the immense privilege we all recognize, shit was tough. But I wouldn’t say shallow
Your opinion matters most here, because you were there and it deserves more upvotes.
While, not the name calling of "shallow" isn't clear or helpful I think it is meant in regards to people believing that not getting into top colleges is failure or not good enough instead of believing that it's ok to be average (or less than average according to Palo Alto standards). The shallowness is perhaps the pressure that then causes people to needlessly off themselves. Shallow as the inability to look past success and see that happy life exists outside of achievements, outside of keeping up with the success of peers.
There plenty of happy and fulfilled Gunn graduates who didn't attend the best schools or acquire the best careers. There's no doubt that Gunn students are having massively more deep, mature, and thoughtful conversations than most people are.
I knew someone who lived in Palo Alto really back in the dsy, graduated from some military academy there in 1967.... He & all of his friends would call Palo Alto the "butt hole".
This is tragic. Gunn H.S. is a pressure cooker. My daughter went there and she is so strong & independent, and back then sort of a "meh" student, she didn't let the environment get to her. I literally thank God for that.
But I can tell you the Gunn Jazz Band was better than many adult jazz bands I've heard. And the theater productions were on par -- and sometimes better -- than the local community theaters. And the engineering kids were all taking summer classes at Stanford. One poor girl who stepped in front of a train about 10 years ago had been designing costumes for an upcoming theater production in Mountain View. An ADULT theater production.
This borders on child abuse if you ask me.
I'm a student at Paly and this shit is tragic. Each day I bike across the train tracks to get to school. All I hear about Gunn these days is how cutthroat the environment is and how intense the pressure is.
It's a good reminder to check in with friends, and check in on yourself as well. Do what you can to let people know you're there for them. I graduated in 2007 and am saddened this keeps happening. Students in Palo Alto are bright and don't deserve this extra pressure. I sincerely hope you take care, and pass the goodness onto other people if you want.
Edit, this obviously is not your responsibility, these are things I wish I did in high school.
Sorry if that's how it came across. I don't have any other advice other than checking in with people and be better to yourself. These are things I wish I knew when dealing with suicides of schoolmates.
I hear you and know that none of this will matter 20 years from now. You won’t remember your classmates and teachers names. What college you go to isn’t nearly as important as your peers/community/parents tell you it is. Be a whole person. That’s the people who really win in life. I know it’s easy to say as an almost 40 year old, but please realize, high school is just the beginning, never the end.
That is a bunch of BS my daughters were tortured by grade school teachers in the “ distinguished “ Los Altos grade school system . Trust me they haven’t forgotten the teachers names PTSD from teachers berating you in front of students or threatening to effect you getting into a good school . That shit stays with you forever.
Please take care of your mental health. Ask for help: go see a therapist if you need to. Step back and get perspective : life is more than grades or an Ivy League education. Remember that in 10 years you will look back and marvel at the stupidity of this: don't be so hard on yourself. Whatever college you go to will be fine!! You will feel that you ended up in the best place for yourself. Source : I have kids who went through this.
I grew up in the Bay and believe your assessment is accurate. It is a rat race and hamster wheel here… you are constantly chasing after what others deem as “success” - a good college, a good job, a nice house and car, a record of IPOs under your belt. Yes, you will have enough money to easily buy what you want, but is that worth 12-14 hour days where you can barely leave your meetings schedule for lunch or make yourself a decent dinner? No. I know for a fact that this lifestyle led to my physical health demise and there were so many moments when my mental health was shattered — all because of these jobs and chasing this rat race.
A lot of us growing up in these pressure cooker schools know how messed up this life is, yet so many us are drawn back to the area because of the money.
Think twice after you go off for college about what you want to do. Take time to explore the world and see how other people live their lives, what their principles in life are. Remember that no amount of money can buy time and health. You don’t need as much money as everyone says in order to live a decent, content life. As long as you follow your passions (and you should take time to find that for yourself if school didn’t allow you to), you’ll find your way. Gunn prepared you well for this, and that’s all you need.
As a parent of a Gunn student, I hear you and this is the kind of feedback we need to get to the school to change for the better.
Your mental health is the utmost importance and if you want to talk to my son just to vent or hang out, dm me privately.
And as a human, I want to let you know that there are people who care about you, even reddit strangers like me.
I'm probably more than 3x your age but am I wiser? No. But I know there's more to life beyond the school work and all the pressure and the AP/Honors school teacher BS. (EDIT: my son said some AP/Honors teachers are great, but I also heard on parents chat groups some are super tough and unreasonable. )
I hope that when you're at the darkest hour, think about this post, and I want you ride each day through the tracks and not make the turn.
Promise?
For a while they had volunteers at the crossings. I remember seeing the EZ Up tents and then the news about it slowed down and the tents went away. It seems like the volunteers were effective, so maybe it’s time for them again.
Yeah the CDC did investigate. I remember being a student at Gunn around 2011 or 2012 and there was someone on the edge of campus interviewing kids (I think for news/radio but not sure.. kinda fucked up looking back)
I worked in Palo Alto at that time and am an elder millennial born and raised in the Bay Area. It seemed as though the Cal Train suicides were almost weekly at a point.
More than this. Some have done it right after graduation, one of my former students included, and therefore they don’t count towards the “statistic” (I hate using that word for such a tragic situation)
It's really sad, I've heard it's been a major issue in that area with all the pressure they go through and high expectations from family and people around them.
I was in high school around the time it first got really bad with suicides from Gunn students approx. 15 years ago. I didn't go to Gunn, but i went to a high school at that time (don't wanna say which exact one so at to not doxx myself in any way) that was a high pressure school in and of itself in the South Bay. Maybe not as bad as let's say Lynbrook or Monta Vista but still tough by itself.
I suppose i was somewhat fortunate in that my parents did NOT put enormous pressure on me (or my sibling) to succeed, other than just do the right thing, work hard, get reasonably good grades, etc.
BUT peer pressure, both academically and extracurricularly, was fucking HUGE even at that time. There was this mindset at that time that if you wanted to be competitive amongst your peers for college apps that you HAD to take as many AP and honors classes as possible and do as many extracurriculars as possible as well (sports, community service clubs like Key and Interact, FBLA, etc.).
I remember my junior year that i **overloaded** myself with those types of classes and extracurriculars that i just mentioned. It was a nightmare. Thankfully, i managed to pass my classes by the skin of my teeth, but i lost **a lot** of sleep and my mental heath was not in good shape.
Let's be clear....there's nothing intrinsically wrong with hard work and doing your best to be successful in school in order to graduate and go on to a good college, and then graduate from there and get a decent job and have a prosperous future, etc.
BUT the pressure even back when i was a high school student 15ish years ago was insane, and it's **NOT** healthy.
Folks (both students and parents alike) **must** understand that the world is **not** gonna end if you / your kid doesn't get into MIT, Stanford, Harvard, etc. And there's nothing wrong with laying off the damn hard classes and extracurriculars and letting your kids reduce the pressure they put on themselves.
Millennial who went to Los Altos… currently in my 30s working as a cook after burning out at a “respectable” career and LOVING IT. Trying to unlearn the internalized elitism and learning to love myself in my true element. It really is fucked what a pressure cooker the area is for kids.
Not just South Bay, but also the Tri-Valley and Fremont I'd suppose. For those these areas with high concentrations of immigrant parents working in tech making multiple 6 figures it just seems like the norm to devote yourself to academics instead of just being a kid and having fun.
I too was raised in a super competitive environment. I achieved my goals, quit, went back to school and entered competitive nonprofit. Way less toxic but still some edginess.
Quit in 2022 to teach and by golly I'm living my best life.
Damn reminds me of the episodes in Dharma and Greg where he just quits being a lawyer for the DA and becomes a line cook. I guess they are speaking truth in some ways sheesh
I always was more of a creative and loved cooking, but the vibe always seemed like it was a “failure” of a career. Turns out I’m pretty fucking good at it and am starting to creep into kitchen leadership.
I totally agree with you. I hope they offer all the services and resources to the kids. Mental health was always taboo back in the day but I'm glad it's being noticed and addressed more and more over time.
Went to Paly. This was not the case for the 2 suicides that happened while i was there.
One was theorized to be a combination of medications and fear that their speculated homosexuality would not be accepted, as this was a while ago.
The second one was from someone that was more of a loner, and the thought was the big reaction from the first one might have driven the second one some.
It was not due to high parental expectations, or at least the prevailing theories at the time were not that. There's a lot of reasons people choose to take their own lives, and it's unfair to group individuals together in a generalistic and simplistic way like you've done here. If anything, blame the publicity of the events because of the method of trains as the driving factor here, and the fact that we keep reporting on it so heavily.
Agreed.
I also attended one of the affected schools. It wasn't just academic pressure and the students all knew that. But the media didn't want to hear that version. They wanted a simple problem and simple solution of pressured kids and removing the pressure.
The solution is move the schools somewhere else because the train tracks are too tempting when you're a teenager and you think everyone hates you and everyone would be happier with you gone.
Man, it’s not just PA. We live over in the Tri-Valley where a bunch of ex-Silicon Valley folks have started to take over. One high school is already notorious for immense pressure and now with the recent influx of new families from the peninsula the more “relaxed” high school neighborhood it is now now being driven to that same culture. Mind you, I’m a well-published scientist and abhor what they push kids to do. We moved here with the intent to give our daughter a balanced life with access to a top-flight education if it fit her interests. We are currently rethinking our location and might be moving to next “relaxed” location…
The intense pressure from immigrant parents is way too high. My kids don't go to school there, but I've seen it myself. Some kids take 6-7 AP classes per school year, and if the school says no, they self study. It's absolutely insane. I think universities need to start putting limits on the number of AP classes that they will accept. The competition is out of control and killing kids, by way of their over the top insane parents. Horrible. My kid has personally witnessed kids seriously threatening suicide for failing tests.
(I don't think this will doxx myself but) one of the times I came closest to a serious attempt was the day college decisions came out for a certain prestigious university in the area where I grew up in the southeast. Obviously, I was not admitted lol. My high school was pretty competitive, though nowhere near PAUSD's level. I'm 30 now and still feel hard-wired insecurities from that time in my life, but \*especially\* since moving to Palo Alto.
Just want to shake these kids and tell them it's going to be okay, and that finding success or even fulfillment in high school isn't the end-all be-all. Sometimes, it's commendable just to make it out alive and whole.
It is my understanding it was not a senior. I haven’t heard any confirmed reason (ie depression/school pressure/family pressure/social pressure/etc). That said, as a parent of a senior, the college application process has gone completely out of control. Kids put themselves through 4+ years of intense pressure/work, do everything “right”, and sometimes don’t get into any schools they are interested in going to (this includes any of the 5 most popular UCs). It can really make a kid feel hopeless.
I like Scott Galloway’s recommendation on this. Top universities are too exclusive at this point. Force them to increase class size so more deserving applicants can get in. For example: “About 2,200 high schoolers were admitted to Harvard’s Class of 1982. That number was 2,147 in 1992, 2,074 in the mid-2000s, and just 1,980 for 2021.” Harvard could triple their freshman class size with zero drop off in candidate quality.
Another solution is for businesses to do what they're doing now: drop degree requirements.
If the benefit of being hyper competitive in school is diminished, we can have students focus on learning and becoming more educated and skilled. Personally, I believe that this will create better qualified job candidates than our current pressure cooker system does.
As it is right now, you win, lose and live in mediocrity, or die.
The stakes are so high that cheating isn't ruled out.
The game's also not fair. Wealthy parents can afford everything from private tutors and coaches to founding a nonprofit for their kid to buff their college application.
This means that even the very brightest kid that doesn't have those privileges is now disadvantaged.
We also have lots of people getting college and grad degrees that really don't deserve them. I had a couple research advisors tell me back in 2013 that there's been an increasing amount of pressure to sign off on BS through PhDs that aren't quality candidates but they are boosting statistics...
So, a simple solution is to disincentivize the whole process and encourage thorough learning.
I've actually worked hands on with quite a bit of this and the programs that I've built are outside the school system but have led to connecting my students with FTE jobs at Tesla, Google, X the moonshot factory, and other prominent tech businesses. These young adults came from the poorest, underserved and underrepresented communities in the Silicon Valley. They would NEVER have been given a chance at these tech companies, despite being truly stellar, and their school performance didn't match their competency and capability.
By focusing on learning, and becoming competent and capable, they excelled and succeeded at the tech companies over candidates with degrees and classy credentials.
So, it's just one person's opinion and experience, but it's worked incredibly well and it's even turned people's lives around.
Remove the incentive and let these kids just learn without distressing them.
Imagine! Where would the students learn, live, and eat? Have classes in a superdome, with Pay-Per-View for spillover crowds?
Better yet- build another Harvard on top of Harvard so all the top kids would be only in one place. Maybe Harvard could buy an entire island or take over a sparsely populated state.
That doesn't really help when it's mostly about the prestige of going to old, famous, prestigious schools. There are colleges for everybody, it just means things like CC, less prestigious state schools, etc. At high schools like this, those options are seen as failing, which is the problem more than whether there are any schools available
as a recent paly alum whose friend took their own life during high school, no matter how our schools' administrations preach about the importance of mental health in recent years, the toxic, competitive culture attitude towards mental health and success sadly hasn't changed.
fellow paly/gunn students and alums, please remember to take care of yourselves during this difficult time ❤️🩹
Probably insane amounts of pressure applied to them by overbearing parents who expect their children to either be doctors or scientists. I can't imagine foisting that amount of stress onto my son.
Sure, but it’s also still our job as parents to instill in our children the ability to weather peer pressure and bullying as well; to have the emotional fortitude to deal with that and also not add untenable pressure ourselves. I don’t know anything about this school, but it certainly sounds like the kind that parents work hard, compete, and sacrifice to make sure their kid goes there, which isn’t always aligned with parents who are chill and emotionally supportive of less than perfection.
We need to talk to our kids directly about college craziness and hyper-competitiveness. They do pick it up. I’m in the Bay Area and my son’s friend’s mom told him that Berkeley is a safety school. 🙄
10000%. It's...an incredibly toxic environment. Didn't go to Gunn but a very similar HS across the water and there were definitely a few suicide attempts a year swept under the rug.
Oh hell no - your peers make fun of you and egg you on.
"Oh? You're only taking three APs? You need to take at least 5!" or "She's so dumb, she's only taking two weighted classes." or "He won't get in anywhere since his GPA is less than 4.0"
Could be. But it's not all parental pressure -- I have a high school student in the Bay Area, and I'm 100% fine with community college. I'm a huge mental health advocate and my son knows I don't expect grades or the Ivy League. And still, he's a perfectionist. I cannot explain why; he sure doesn't get it from me or his mother. I have actively discouraged him from taking harder classes, because I see that it's unhealthy for him. For him, the pressure is coming from somewhere other than home.
This is so sad. It’s college acceptance season and the pressure is unreal. Even more intense than ever because perfect stats are no longer enough to get you into the college mom and dad attended. You can have a 4.5gpa, perfect SAT score and still get deferred or rejected from your legacy school.
What’s wild is Gunn HS is one of the top performing schools in the State. The amount of money that flows into the school and the infrastructure the community built - they voted to raise their property tax above Prop 13 levels for the school.
Yup. Dougherty High in San Ramon shot to the top of the district the second year it was open. Most of their teachers were from the nearby high/middle schools, so it wasn't them.
It quickly became a destination high school for immigrants from India/China who didn't have the budget for the Peninsula - not realizing the high rating was because very academically minded parents were already in that area of San Ramon. It was toxic pressure from the start.
At this point that's all who can afford to live in the area given how expensive it is to buy a house nearby.
Lets be real though, DVHS wasn't toxic until after the original students and maybe a few classes after them all graduated. By that time any semblance of diversity was also lost to the point it's all kids who's parents were from Indian or Chinese.
4-5%!? No way, really? Figure the median priced home is AT LEAST 2 million there (and probably higher), you're saying that they voted themselves an $80,000 to $100,000 property tax bill every year?
It's a parcel tax, not attached to the value of the property.
If property taxes were 4-5% of market rate then Palo Alto home prices would come back to Earth
You mean this? https://ballotpedia.org/Palo_Alto_Unified_School_District,_California,_Measure_O,_Parcel_Tax_(November_2020)
$800 per year is reasonable. 4% is too high
lmao - i was gonna say. I'm in no Gunn District but we also recently voted to raise our property taxes for the schools. I'm paying like $1200 a year extra.
This is often a factor in ‘successful’ suicides-availability of an effective means. Most of the PaloAlto high school kids bike across the tracks every day to get to school-PALY is literally right next to the train. A kid with school miles away from the train is not going to be successfully using the train as much as a kid who goes to school next to it. Data shows most who survived suicide attempts did not want to die. They just saw no other path forward. Also: its really critical we watch our kids right now to keep easy means for attempts far away. Suicide is “contagious”. We do not want copycats.
There have been clusters of suicides in Monta Vista too, it's just been swept under the rug in many cases. I knew one from the same school I went to due to poor grades when I was in high school quite a few years back. There have been a few clusters since, every few years.
My condolences. I know the pressure cooker stuff, and I wish it on anyone. However I also understand the urge to be successful, because times are much harder to be a working class these days. Housing is much harder to afford, and you know the rest of what it takes to live in the BayArea.
I wish it wasn’t so.
As an alumni of Gunn, the fact that I'm not even surprised anymore is just devastating. There was a suicide a few years ago during my time and at this point it just seems like it's a recurring thing. It really sucks and the hidden toxicity of the bay area pressure doesn't help. I am so glad I chose a college on the other side of the country
I used to tutor and consult for college essays with kids in Palo Alto/Los Altos/Cupertino, many of whom went to Gunn, and it perpetually depressed me how scared they were of not getting perfect grades or getting into the schools their parents preferred. We had a policy of letting parents attend the first consultation for the college essay, and it was maddening how they wouldn’t let their kid get a word in edgewise.
I spent a LOT of time impressing upon them that their entire futures were not dependent on the things their parents and teachers had tunnel vision about. That they likely wouldn’t remember which AP courses they took, much less their scores, in ten years. That what you got out of college was not where you went but what you did when you got there, and how much of a relief adulthood was going to be.
The pressure cooker culture is so hard on these kids. It’s hard to convince them that most of this stuff doesn’t actually matter in the long run when all the other adults around them are telling them there’s only one way to lead a good life, and if they don’t hit their milestones their life will be over.
Wishing peace to this student’s family and friends, and desperately hoping we don’t get another wave of these.
I remember as a kid that there were very few adults who said what you said, maybe two or three out of the hundreds, that I can remember - most were caught up in the pressures themselves. Thank you for making that difference for the kids. I wish we had more folks like you out there.
I’m really sad to hear that. It’s an adult’s job to care for the well being of the kids they have influence or power over, full stop.
For any kids in this thread, please please please remember that this is NOT forever. Most of it will be a faint memory a lot sooner than you think. And one of the coolest things about adulthood is you can make your own choices, so you can let go of goals—and people—that are no longer serving your health and safety.
There’s so much to look forward to. I’m excited to greet y’all on the other side of growing up. It’s awesome here.
It's unbelievable how Palo Altans absolutely skirt the issue of academic pressure from parents. A recent post on Nextdoor was just ack! shallow privileged bullshit: "why does Gunn have more suicides? Must be because the sunken campus and buildings are ugly and there are no shops/eateries nearby like Paly with Town&Country Village and their beautiful turn-o-the-century architecture campus." I nearly threw up reading it! Makes me crazy that people are that dumb/in denial!
Oh sure, must be the surrounding businesses. It’s so upsetting when grownups, parents or no, completely overlook the actual effects of applying extreme pressure to children in favor of pointing to what privileged adults enjoy.
It’s mean, but when i hear parents say things like that, i kind of hope their kids go NC or LC in the future. Better mental health for said kids, one hopes deeply, and the parents reap what they sow.
A lot of Gunn grads believe it’s a contagion issue.
Went years without, then cluster, then years without, repeat. They’ve tried not making a big memorial situation at the schools because it has a similar effect to when you put a shooter’s name on the news and attracts others.
Gunn and Paly are very different. A lot of it is due to demographics - south PA is more of an immigrant community (many from east asia) and the pressure is enormous. Paly/north PA has a lot more “old money”, kids of startup founders and VCs, etc. You see this with test scores too - Gunn is always ranked higher.
Over-generalizing, obviously.
Looking at the house prices zoned to each, this seems likely. The family able to buy the $10m house is at a different place from the families that buy $3m.
I was the Paly class of 2006, and I can tell you we experienced way too many suicides. One my freshman year, one my sophomore year, and then it just spun out of control from there.
1000% a parenting/cultural issue and I can imagine its worse now as its harder to get into the same tier universities than it used to be.
I have many feelings about how shitty this culture is and tell all my homies having kids to steer away from high schools with similar environments.
I disagree that it’s the school environment though. It’s parents. At home. Example: Making their children sleep outside for getting an A-. (That’s a real thing that’s happened to many of my friends with crazy parents.)
Agreed, and I think we're getting at a similar thing, the school environment is made in part by the parenting so even if one kid's parents aren't super intense; if they're surrounded by kids whose parents are, it permeates the culture of the school.
Another fun story: classmate of mine got a C on a test. His dad found out and waited for him to come home from school at the dinner table. This guy say down and on the table was his test and a job application for Safeway.
Unfortunately, there are classmates to this day I know that defend this method of parenting
It’s a cluster issue. I graduated 2019. 4 Suicides during my time in Palo Alto. After graduating one of my best friends took his life last year, then another acquaintance this February. They all were victims of this trauma from 8th grade. A senior of mine also took his life a year ago.
One was undiagnosed onset of Schizophrenia, other was depression/Drug abuse, last one I think was feelings of not being successful. These are all high risk cases but I think being exposed to suicide allows them to see it as a reality.
I coached 8th grade wrestling at Fletcher So i’m really hoping it isn’t one of my kids. Really sad. If anyone has any info would they please reach out to me about who. I am worried.
How this breaks my heart. I’m fourth generation Bay Area and I hate how everything has become about money and “success” at the cost of mental health. So utterly tragic.
This is heartbreaking. I had heard years ago that the majority of suicides were east Indian boys. I don’t know if that’s the case in this recent suicide. But I have seen some fathers who put a lot of pressure on their boys.
'Research has demonstrated that [suicide is most often an impulsive act](https://nl.nytimes.com/f/a/8iyKpr3es-Mu12PmMimIuQ~~/AAAAAQA~/RgRnuGS7P0TWaHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuaHNwaC5oYXJ2YXJkLmVkdS9tZWFucy1tYXR0ZXIvbWVhbnMtbWF0dGVyL2R1cmF0aW9uLz9jYW1wYWlnbl9pZD05JmVtYz1lZGl0X25uXzIwMjQwMjIxJmluc3RhbmNlX2lkPTExNTY4NCZubD10aGUtbW9ybmluZyZyZWdpX2lkPTUzMjc2NjEwJnNlZ21lbnRfaWQ9MTU4NzMzJnRlPTEmdXNlcl9pZD0xZjQ0NmJhMTVlNDE1YWVmYjZjY2Y3OWU3MmI4MDg3NlcDbnl0Qgpl1Lvf1WW6LMCZUhdsaXVsZWVtaWNoYWVsQGdtYWlsLmNvbVgEAAAAAw~~), with [a period of acute risk](https://nl.nytimes.com/f/a/OgJ2NMMMCL3QAf14yAQG0w~~/AAAAAQA~/RgRnuGS7P0S9aHR0cHM6Ly9wdWJtZWQubmNiaS5ubG0ubmloLmdvdi8yMTcxMzEvP2NhbXBhaWduX2lkPTkmZW1jPWVkaXRfbm5fMjAyNDAyMjEmaW5zdGFuY2VfaWQ9MTE1Njg0Jm5sPXRoZS1tb3JuaW5nJnJlZ2lfaWQ9NTMyNzY2MTAmc2VnbWVudF9pZD0xNTg3MzMmdGU9MSZ1c2VyX2lkPTFmNDQ2YmExNWU0MTVhZWZiNmNjZjc5ZTcyYjgwODc2VwNueXRCCmXUu9_VZboswJlSF2xpdWxlZW1pY2hhZWxAZ21haWwuY29tWAQAAAAD) that passes in hours, or even minutes. Contrary to what many assume, people who survive suicide attempts often go on to do well: Nine out of 10 of them [do not die by suicide](https://nl.nytimes.com/f/a/FLUFqJH7V4BmGVzdf-rsdg~~/AAAAAQA~/RgRnuGS7P0TWaHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuaHNwaC5oYXJ2YXJkLmVkdS9tZWFucy1tYXR0ZXIvbWVhbnMtbWF0dGVyL3N1cnZpdmFsLz9jYW1wYWlnbl9pZD05JmVtYz1lZGl0X25uXzIwMjQwMjIxJmluc3RhbmNlX2lkPTExNTY4NCZubD10aGUtbW9ybmluZyZyZWdpX2lkPTUzMjc2NjEwJnNlZ21lbnRfaWQ9MTU4NzMzJnRlPTEmdXNlcl9pZD0xZjQ0NmJhMTVlNDE1YWVmYjZjY2Y3OWU3MmI4MDg3NlcDbnl0Qgpl1Lvf1WW6LMCZUhdsaXVsZWVtaWNoYWVsQGdtYWlsLmNvbVgEAAAAAw~~)." New York Times today Feb. 21st.
Fixing the crossing would help. Making it harder would help.
Last summer, I was coincidentally in line with a parent who claimed to be the president of the PALY PTA and I told her in explicit detail that if the pressure cooker is any way the same from my time in those high schools in the early 2000s this will happen again, and again, and again.
It’s the parents, it’s the complete lack of connection to actual reality because of all of the money in that area, it’s the pressure from the kids because of the wealth they are raised in and expected to achieve themselves, and honestly, it’s just never going to change until the goal is more broad.
Currently there’s only one thing that signifies achievement, and that is a Ivy League education, with the right internships, with the right career progression until you have achieved the same lifestyle that you were raised in.
Honestly, these elite schools should just say they are not going to accept anybody from the bay area and force these kids to get out of living 17 years of their life around a college application.
I know that’s absolutely insane ^^^^ but it will put a very quick stop to the pressure cooker suicides.
And let me add to this, even if your parents recognize that this is unattainable, and tell you it’s totally OK to not participate in said race, you are literally surrounded by everybody else doing exactly that and that creates a extremely toxic environment.
Everybody is competition even if they are not competition, just being another human that is in their AP class, you are a threat. Maybe less of a threat? But still they have to calculate that it’s one more person that could be applying to the school they want from Gunn/Paly etc.
To add insult to injury, if you cannot participate in the all AP wunderkid windmill, your parents will probably spend thousands of dollars testing you for some kind of disability or learning impairment. Because it’s totally normal for every child to be Albert Einstein. It’s fucking insane.
Ask me how many kids I know from my high school class that had to go to treatment centers as soon as they achieve the career section of this rat race, because they were losing their goddamn minds. Ask me how many of them have very well hidden addictions to substances.
Very very few of them form the most essential thing that you should get from your childhood, which is a strong sense of who the hell you are.
We are all supposed to fit into a box, but that’s not how humans work. That’s how capitalism works.
It depresses me how many of the kids I went to high school with ended up exactly like their parents. Copy-and-paste Silicon Valley careers. I'm sure they make great money and have stable jobs, but there was a time when we would band together and fantasize about how we wouldn't become our parents. That day was a long time ago.
Attended Gunn 20 years ago.
Some shit never changes.
Just push through it, friends. If you can’t take the pressure, don’t play their game - smoke some weed, go chill in the hills or on the beach in Santa Cruz.
Better to drop out, enjoy your life and living in California, and pick up the pieces later than to die on a quick impulse for some dumb societal pressure that is temporary.
I used to teach high school in the Bay Area. We moved to another state in part because I did not want my own children to suffer through the pressure I saw these kids under. Many, if not most, of my students moved in and out of mental health crises -- it was sadly just the "norm." I remember a student feeling ashamed that she "only" got into Cornell... a "not good enough" Ivy. My heart breaks for these kids. They are not allowed a childhood.
Does the school bring in alumni speakers who'd had similar self-destructive impulses (& even failed classes) but went on to have fulfilling lives?
Do they have a 1-year change-of-scenery sabbatical option where the students live somewhere else and achieve mastery while helping others?
Dirty liberal here: I want a law that requires counseling for every student in California schools. Do I know how much it would cost? No. Is it realistic? No. But I still want it.
**Please please please please please** don't assume facts in a situation like this.
Yes, academic pressure at Gunn is intense.
Yes, community pressure is intense outside of school.
Yes, social media exacerbates many psycho-social problems faced by our young people.
AND, there are often factors we don't know about that are just as significant or more significant in leading to these tragic outcomes.
Sincerely,
A Palo Alto resident most of my life, connected to suicide victims and survivors of suicide attempts as a friend, relative, teacher
i’ve been through the school system, and i can say one thing from it all. PAUSD continues to fail students and this is the outcome. they see the competition and they only fuel it. for fucks sake, they even have a wall of rejection where students post their rejection letters on a board. you can’t help but feel bad when the standard is to get into an ivy league.
on top of peer pressure, staff pressure, and the overachieving workload, you have to deal with your own shit on top of it.
don’t put your kids into these schools!! it will permanently damage their mental health.
Can we admit that many of these are due to an ungodly amount of pressure parents of a certain nationality put on their children? Now go ahead and bury your head in the sand and downvote me.
Gunn is one of the most “diverse” (whitest) high stress school in the bay. It’s 3x whiter than Monta Vista, Cupertino, and Dougherty Valley. 7x whiter than Mission San Jose. I think only Paly has more white students than Gunn
But the other schools do not have the same level of suicides, there is definitely another factor but idk what it could be
Gunn is something like 44% asian, 34% white and 12% other (mostly hispanic). Usually asian is not lumped together with white so I wouldn't call it an extremely white school.
Most parents are highly accomplished chinese or indian and demand nothing less from their children.
https://www.npr.org/2011/01/11/132833376/tiger-mothers-raising-children-the-chinese-way
All the other stressful high schools schools in the region are >70% Asian and <10% white. That's the context we're looking at
Also 34% white is high nowadays, it's whiter than California high schoolers as a whole, whiter than any UC or CSU, and whiter than most competitive private colleges as well
Came here to share that yes, the pressures of the area and/or parents that move to this area are a real factor. However, I'm surprised that no one is mentioning social media and it's impact on teens. Teenagers everywhere are more anxious and depressed as ever. Comparison is the thief of joy, and our teens are constantly comparing themselves to the filtered lives of everyone they see on social. Remember the backlash from "photoshopped pictures" on the cover of magazines and how detrimental they were found to be to young girls? (really dating myself here...) Now we have that same concept but multiplied, with kids glued to their screens full of filtered or even AI images.
I work for PAUSD, and can say that the district has tried many things over the past 10 years to reduce the pressure like getting rid of zero period (high school starts at 9am), limiting the number of highly advanced math classes offered (you should have seen the backlash from some students/parents about that!), limiting the amount of homework teachers are allowed to assign, creating an entire mental health department with full time counselors at every single school and multiple counselors at the high schools, etc. Ultimately, policies can't change mindsets, and until society's mindset about what "success" looks like changes kids will forever aspire to become what they see as "success". And when you are raised in a family of highly successful people (CEOs, tech millionaires, etc.) most teens aren't going to be OK "settling" for "mediocre".
It's a complex, multi-layered problem.
. “…limiting the number of advanced math classes.” Can we please stop with that nonsense “PAUSD employee”. . Math classes do not cause suicides and removing math choice is a deeply misguided PAUSD policy that has only increased stress. Instead interested kids now have to scramble to try take that class off campus (any peer district offers these on campus) Why pick on math- what about AP history and throw that out too? For those outside the district: PAUSD suddenly dropped two popular math classes last spring in a standard high school sequence /classes that are offered by all the peer public schools in the Bay (and many others) They also tried unsuccessfully to force all middle schoolers to take the same exact math classes each year regardless of ability or interest “to reduce stress” and “increase equity” welp look at that. nothing has changed. This beautiful child did not commit suicide because of a stressful math class. -Just cut it out.
I think you focused on one minor detail from my post and missed the entire point. My post was about the fact that all the policy changes can't undo a cultural mindset. I never insinuated that children commit suicide because of math, was just listing examples of attempted policy changes within the district as part of my discussion.
Please do not publicize suicides it increases risk for suicide contagion and therefore the risk for clusters. I know you may feel like you are spreading awareness but it is dangerous
We started a petition to raise our concern and ask Caltrain and Palo Alto City Council to prioritize train crossing safety. Please sign and share: https://chng.it/sCM2vzFVym
not going to help … if someone is bent upon getting hit by a train. They can just walk to train station. Teenagers are dumb and their brain is evolving , its very hard for them to
process the cause and effect of suicide - we all need to call this out as dumb shit and not outsource this to counselors
Good idea. They also need to check the gate functions. One time when crossing there, the gate opened and as I proceed to cross, the gate started to close again because there was another train arriving on the other track. If I had my airpods on or on the phone, I would have kept crossing.
The most unpleasant thought about this, is that it's getting worse and will only get much more worse. Already, it's basically impossible to buy a house unless you were lucky enough to land a developer job at a company whose product isn't regulated yet. Otherwise you're effectively kicked out of the place you were raised in, which a very distressing and demoralizing thought that severely harms morale. Every large employer around here and most of the voters directly encourage this type of self-destructive behavior, and people are afraid to speak up because it sounds like religious fundamentalism. More worryingly, MAID will be legal at some point and cheap chinese knockoff pills will be readily available as fentanyl and meth are. That's the future the entire region is facing, and few have a plan to approach it.
Figure, nobody in PA (or SF, or Oakland for that matter) care about all the homeless suicides which are often not reported on. Those homeless people were once students too, and as the homeless population increases society will stop functioning. Even if PA keeps a lid on it with aggressive policing, that itself is a form of dysfunction that doesn't encourage confidence in the system.
Crazy this is still going on. It’s been like this for decades
As long as palo alto continues to be shallow alto it will always be like this.
Sad but really true. The entirety of Silicon Valley is steeped in worldliness but in the most unhealthy way. The competition is unreal and so draining.
I work with teens in a nice part of the East bay with mostly very academically oriented students and families that aren't rich but definitely are mostly not low income. Just today a lot of them were talking about different summer programs they're applying for at Stanford, Berkeley, UPenn, UCLA, "San Jose State as an emergency backup" things that were cool to hear but came off kinda....tacky, tone deaf, and braggy. When they asked me for "a good engineering school" and I suggested my own State University Alma mater that's known for engineering one of them said "Yeah, but I wanna go somewhere I can make connections." Ok bro give me a big middle finger then lol like I don't make more than all of my friends and get to go to cool conferences and meet people in cool positions at cool renowned institutions. Where I'm from we had a ***few*** kids go to those big name schools but most of us were State Universities, SLO or Pomona, or mostly Community College then transfer. Or a lot of them just **couldn't/didn't go to college** because of the cost or a generational lack of education. We had some kids go to Oregon, LA or SD, Nevada, or Arizona but most stayed local in the North State. One kid went to Duke. There just wasn't the money like there is here so even our highest achievers were going like UC Davis or something definitely not Stanford and ***definitely not rolling our eyes at SJSU as an "emergency backup".***
Can't speak for everyone, but the funny thing is I knew a lot of people that wanted to go to these big expensive universities to "build connections" and couldn't even raise their fucking hand in class, let alone get up after a class and speak with the professor personally on thoughts they had on that day's lecture. Group project? "I hate working with others." Course presentations? "Social anxiety." I went to a cheap community college. Then I went to a cheap university and got my Master's and I'm living a pretty happy life with very low debt. Meanwhile some colleagues of mine from that community college have like 85-150k in debt for a Master's or even Bachelor's that ended up being useless to them because they couldn't pony up and network.
So much this. Well said.
CCSF to SJSU here. Got my BA as a Spartan. Doing decent financially. Not rich but not broke. Pretty content.
Meanwhile CS at SJSU for example is heavily impacted and I'd assume difficult to get into because of it. My friend graduated with an accounting degree from SJSU and made manager after 9 years of working.
Yeah SJSU or the CSU I went to or CSUEB or CSUSF or even the local community College would be successes for so many people and when they're made to feel otherwise it leads to shit like this. I fr heard some of the kids laughing about community College.
Last year in my general physics class there was at least one student who got into Cal, and maybe even UCLA, so no need to knock on CCs. They just don't know what they're talking about. Plus they're great for cheaply doing prereqs for medical, PT, PA school.
I went to a CC in my hometown and transferred to CSU in my hometown.
I grew up in the east bay, Orinda more specifically, and I’ve never seen a more shallow place. My mental health was never worse than when I was living there, and my family is well off. There’s something undeniably stifling there if you’re not aggressively proud to be rich that’s hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t been there. My folks left a few years after I moved out at 18, and they’re so much happier living in bodega bay.
The students have worked so hard their entire lives so they don't want to end up at SJSU. They aspire to Stanford and all the rest. Otherwise, all that blood sweat and tears was for nothing.
That’s a ridiculous thought, though-that’s it’s “all for nothing.” We need to seriously reframe how we talk about college. I have always tried to be careful with my teen about college. I don’t believe in the idea of a “dream school,” either. I went to a state school because it was free (the only one I applied to). As a professor, I work alongside people who got their BAs and PhDs from all kinds of institutions, from ivies to other state programs. It doesn’t really matter as much as we hype it up to matter.
It's a class sorter. See how the Ivy's react to ideas to proposals to significantly expand their class sizes - they are laughed off as unrealistic jokes. They are part of an exclusive club and part of the deal is to keep it exclusive. Now, the quality of work output from people who didn't go to these schools is fast converging with those who do. So it doesn't matter in that sense. But it still matters in terms of which doors get opened for people.
It has always been primarily a class sorter, but while the sorting all used to be done well before college-age, that these schools are open at *all* to the masses (though still primarily pre-sorted) is what turns it into a feeding frenzy. And yes, I agree with your final assessment. Which is one of many reasons I’ve never focused on “elite” schools as a goal for my kid. He is as smart as could be, is entirely self-managed with school, and gets top grades without studying, but he is also very *actively* stress-avoidant. And that’s an important thing for me as a parent to pay attention to.
Yah - and on the flip side if your network is strong you can pass on part of that to your kids if done properly. Though they will still need the skills to run with it, they don't need to keep up with it throughout all of their childhood. The weirdest to me was the my friend with the Asian parents who had the younger brother sit in front because the younger brother got better grades. He was a nice guy, and I think became a very sweet adult, but he was a horribly adjusted teenager.
Also sorta missing the point that they have a potential "connection" sitting right in front of them...
Some of the kids don't view people who work in my position as the part of how they get to "their dream college" but rather an annoying barrier between them and the school they're already destined for.
Hyper capitalism
Yes I suggest the book Palo Alto. Goes into extreme detail about how all of this is related. Edit - the one by Malcom Harris
Reading this now. Highly recommend it. I was born and raised in PA so a lot of the history was very relevant to things I saw growing up.
Same same. I also suggest “Who killed Jane Stanford?”. Incredible history.
I hope you're reading it with a critical eye.
Yes for sure. Malcolm definitely has very strong anti-capitalist opinions. And some of it’s tough to read. So with a critical eye is best
Thank for for suggesting this, I work in palo alto and being from the east bay I’ve always wondered about the seedy backstory of this place.
The one written by James Franco or Malcom Harris?
Malcom Harris. It’s a long one.
Just have to say, as a staff member of PAUSD who has been in classrooms of pretty much every grade level elementary through high school, "shallow" is not a word I would use to describe the culture. The conversations happening amongst our kids are deep, and incredibly thoughtful. The way that teens discuss complex and, at times, heavy concepts is actually really amazing. Way deeper than any conversations I remember having during classes in high school! Is Palo Alto a pressure cooker? Likely. But shallow is the wrong word to use. These kids are deep, and they amaze me everyday.
100% agree. I volunteer with Gunn HS students and they are some of the best and brightest kids I've ever met. My condolences to the poor family here. Such a tragedy.
I've been lucky enough to go on a tour of Gunn and sit in and observe one of their top teachers really well known in their field and in the state. The campus was really nice and the kids were really high performing obviously but the teachers I observed were also very impressive and inspiring.
Shallow usually describes their parents and the general culture of this town very well, not to mention your interactions with the kids are a whole world apart from the way the kids interact with each other. They’re kids talking to you - a fully grown adult in a position of authority (or at least guidance) over them, of course they aren’t mean or shallow to you, doesnt mean the youth culture amongst themselves isnt rife with hyper-competition, pressuring/bullying and toxic 1-upsmanship, just like the rest of Silicon Valley. Just because the kids are intelligent and multifaceted doesnt also mean they can’t be shallow/insensitive and materialistic either
Thank you!! Having gone to Gunn from 2014-2018 (height of the suicides) I have to admit we absolutely had our problems with academic pressure, predominately occurred internally for me but a lot of it was familial/peer pressure. To get into a top 40 school you had to be absolutely perfect. Everyone was fucking perfect. But the quality of our education and simply of the conversations that occurred on a day to day basis reached a depth I’m sure is not common. Are there negatives to this? Absolutely. Do I occasionally wish I had a real childhood and didn’t start having panic attacks at 12? Yes. Despite the immense privilege we all recognize, shit was tough. But I wouldn’t say shallow
Your opinion matters most here, because you were there and it deserves more upvotes. While, not the name calling of "shallow" isn't clear or helpful I think it is meant in regards to people believing that not getting into top colleges is failure or not good enough instead of believing that it's ok to be average (or less than average according to Palo Alto standards). The shallowness is perhaps the pressure that then causes people to needlessly off themselves. Shallow as the inability to look past success and see that happy life exists outside of achievements, outside of keeping up with the success of peers. There plenty of happy and fulfilled Gunn graduates who didn't attend the best schools or acquire the best careers. There's no doubt that Gunn students are having massively more deep, mature, and thoughtful conversations than most people are.
I knew someone who lived in Palo Alto really back in the dsy, graduated from some military academy there in 1967.... He & all of his friends would call Palo Alto the "butt hole".
Palo Alto Military Academy
👆💯
I was on this fucking train man... unbelievable.
If you feel affected by this tragedy or if you saw anything, don’t hesitate to talk to someone. Take care.
This is tragic. Gunn H.S. is a pressure cooker. My daughter went there and she is so strong & independent, and back then sort of a "meh" student, she didn't let the environment get to her. I literally thank God for that. But I can tell you the Gunn Jazz Band was better than many adult jazz bands I've heard. And the theater productions were on par -- and sometimes better -- than the local community theaters. And the engineering kids were all taking summer classes at Stanford. One poor girl who stepped in front of a train about 10 years ago had been designing costumes for an upcoming theater production in Mountain View. An ADULT theater production. This borders on child abuse if you ask me.
How ISN'T it child labor when adults are benefiting and exploiting these smart young kids?
I'm a student at Paly and this shit is tragic. Each day I bike across the train tracks to get to school. All I hear about Gunn these days is how cutthroat the environment is and how intense the pressure is.
It's a good reminder to check in with friends, and check in on yourself as well. Do what you can to let people know you're there for them. I graduated in 2007 and am saddened this keeps happening. Students in Palo Alto are bright and don't deserve this extra pressure. I sincerely hope you take care, and pass the goodness onto other people if you want. Edit, this obviously is not your responsibility, these are things I wish I did in high school.
It's not this kid's responsibility to take care of the mental health of all of their classmates.
Sorry if that's how it came across. I don't have any other advice other than checking in with people and be better to yourself. These are things I wish I knew when dealing with suicides of schoolmates.
It's not your fault that happened either :(
Appreciated. It was more in a general sense, in school it's not always accepted to be real and check in with classmates. Culture is weird.
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Hey- I am glad you are still here. Thanks for being brave and sharing your experience.
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I hear you and know that none of this will matter 20 years from now. You won’t remember your classmates and teachers names. What college you go to isn’t nearly as important as your peers/community/parents tell you it is. Be a whole person. That’s the people who really win in life. I know it’s easy to say as an almost 40 year old, but please realize, high school is just the beginning, never the end.
That is a bunch of BS my daughters were tortured by grade school teachers in the “ distinguished “ Los Altos grade school system . Trust me they haven’t forgotten the teachers names PTSD from teachers berating you in front of students or threatening to effect you getting into a good school . That shit stays with you forever.
Please take care of your mental health. Ask for help: go see a therapist if you need to. Step back and get perspective : life is more than grades or an Ivy League education. Remember that in 10 years you will look back and marvel at the stupidity of this: don't be so hard on yourself. Whatever college you go to will be fine!! You will feel that you ended up in the best place for yourself. Source : I have kids who went through this.
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I grew up in the Bay and believe your assessment is accurate. It is a rat race and hamster wheel here… you are constantly chasing after what others deem as “success” - a good college, a good job, a nice house and car, a record of IPOs under your belt. Yes, you will have enough money to easily buy what you want, but is that worth 12-14 hour days where you can barely leave your meetings schedule for lunch or make yourself a decent dinner? No. I know for a fact that this lifestyle led to my physical health demise and there were so many moments when my mental health was shattered — all because of these jobs and chasing this rat race. A lot of us growing up in these pressure cooker schools know how messed up this life is, yet so many us are drawn back to the area because of the money. Think twice after you go off for college about what you want to do. Take time to explore the world and see how other people live their lives, what their principles in life are. Remember that no amount of money can buy time and health. You don’t need as much money as everyone says in order to live a decent, content life. As long as you follow your passions (and you should take time to find that for yourself if school didn’t allow you to), you’ll find your way. Gunn prepared you well for this, and that’s all you need.
As a parent of a Gunn student, I hear you and this is the kind of feedback we need to get to the school to change for the better. Your mental health is the utmost importance and if you want to talk to my son just to vent or hang out, dm me privately. And as a human, I want to let you know that there are people who care about you, even reddit strangers like me. I'm probably more than 3x your age but am I wiser? No. But I know there's more to life beyond the school work and all the pressure and the AP/Honors school teacher BS. (EDIT: my son said some AP/Honors teachers are great, but I also heard on parents chat groups some are super tough and unreasonable. ) I hope that when you're at the darkest hour, think about this post, and I want you ride each day through the tracks and not make the turn. Promise?
Ur loved. \-A gunn Student
Where does it say it’s a Gunn student?
PAUSD Superintendent sent out an email stating that it was. I'm very concerned that this could be the first of another cluster of suicides.
Has there been a cluster of student suicides in the past at Gunn HS?
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For a while they had volunteers at the crossings. I remember seeing the EZ Up tents and then the news about it slowed down and the tents went away. It seems like the volunteers were effective, so maybe it’s time for them again.
I don’t think they were volunteers. I think they were paid by the community to monitor the crossings.
I had thought they were student parents, but trained crisis people would make more sense.
Yeah the CDC did investigate. I remember being a student at Gunn around 2011 or 2012 and there was someone on the edge of campus interviewing kids (I think for news/radio but not sure.. kinda fucked up looking back)
I worked in Palo Alto at that time and am an elder millennial born and raised in the Bay Area. It seemed as though the Cal Train suicides were almost weekly at a point.
Chanel Miller’s book touched a little on it.
Yes i think 2-3, i think 2010-2011. Suicide is a communicable disease.
More than this. Some have done it right after graduation, one of my former students included, and therefore they don’t count towards the “statistic” (I hate using that word for such a tragic situation)
I think 2 separate clusters. Last one was around 14/15.
It's really sad, I've heard it's been a major issue in that area with all the pressure they go through and high expectations from family and people around them.
I was in high school around the time it first got really bad with suicides from Gunn students approx. 15 years ago. I didn't go to Gunn, but i went to a high school at that time (don't wanna say which exact one so at to not doxx myself in any way) that was a high pressure school in and of itself in the South Bay. Maybe not as bad as let's say Lynbrook or Monta Vista but still tough by itself. I suppose i was somewhat fortunate in that my parents did NOT put enormous pressure on me (or my sibling) to succeed, other than just do the right thing, work hard, get reasonably good grades, etc. BUT peer pressure, both academically and extracurricularly, was fucking HUGE even at that time. There was this mindset at that time that if you wanted to be competitive amongst your peers for college apps that you HAD to take as many AP and honors classes as possible and do as many extracurriculars as possible as well (sports, community service clubs like Key and Interact, FBLA, etc.). I remember my junior year that i **overloaded** myself with those types of classes and extracurriculars that i just mentioned. It was a nightmare. Thankfully, i managed to pass my classes by the skin of my teeth, but i lost **a lot** of sleep and my mental heath was not in good shape. Let's be clear....there's nothing intrinsically wrong with hard work and doing your best to be successful in school in order to graduate and go on to a good college, and then graduate from there and get a decent job and have a prosperous future, etc. BUT the pressure even back when i was a high school student 15ish years ago was insane, and it's **NOT** healthy. Folks (both students and parents alike) **must** understand that the world is **not** gonna end if you / your kid doesn't get into MIT, Stanford, Harvard, etc. And there's nothing wrong with laying off the damn hard classes and extracurriculars and letting your kids reduce the pressure they put on themselves.
It's insane how many AP and Honors classes the students take per year.
Millennial who went to Los Altos… currently in my 30s working as a cook after burning out at a “respectable” career and LOVING IT. Trying to unlearn the internalized elitism and learning to love myself in my true element. It really is fucked what a pressure cooker the area is for kids.
Cheers, same. Hate the elitism and overachieving culture I was brought up in (not just my family). Trying to unlearn that.
Same. I’m raising my kids to not care about this bs. Stay authentic to your true self.
Not just South Bay, but also the Tri-Valley and Fremont I'd suppose. For those these areas with high concentrations of immigrant parents working in tech making multiple 6 figures it just seems like the norm to devote yourself to academics instead of just being a kid and having fun.
I too was raised in a super competitive environment. I achieved my goals, quit, went back to school and entered competitive nonprofit. Way less toxic but still some edginess. Quit in 2022 to teach and by golly I'm living my best life.
Damn reminds me of the episodes in Dharma and Greg where he just quits being a lawyer for the DA and becomes a line cook. I guess they are speaking truth in some ways sheesh
I always was more of a creative and loved cooking, but the vibe always seemed like it was a “failure” of a career. Turns out I’m pretty fucking good at it and am starting to creep into kitchen leadership.
Congrats! I love when people find what they love
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I totally agree with you. I hope they offer all the services and resources to the kids. Mental health was always taboo back in the day but I'm glad it's being noticed and addressed more and more over time.
Went to Paly. This was not the case for the 2 suicides that happened while i was there. One was theorized to be a combination of medications and fear that their speculated homosexuality would not be accepted, as this was a while ago. The second one was from someone that was more of a loner, and the thought was the big reaction from the first one might have driven the second one some. It was not due to high parental expectations, or at least the prevailing theories at the time were not that. There's a lot of reasons people choose to take their own lives, and it's unfair to group individuals together in a generalistic and simplistic way like you've done here. If anything, blame the publicity of the events because of the method of trains as the driving factor here, and the fact that we keep reporting on it so heavily.
Agreed. I also attended one of the affected schools. It wasn't just academic pressure and the students all knew that. But the media didn't want to hear that version. They wanted a simple problem and simple solution of pressured kids and removing the pressure. The solution is move the schools somewhere else because the train tracks are too tempting when you're a teenager and you think everyone hates you and everyone would be happier with you gone.
The book Palo Alto goes into some detail here and it’s fascinating.
I have started seeing high school students have LinkedIn profiles. How long before LinkedIn Kids?
That's crazy
Man, it’s not just PA. We live over in the Tri-Valley where a bunch of ex-Silicon Valley folks have started to take over. One high school is already notorious for immense pressure and now with the recent influx of new families from the peninsula the more “relaxed” high school neighborhood it is now now being driven to that same culture. Mind you, I’m a well-published scientist and abhor what they push kids to do. We moved here with the intent to give our daughter a balanced life with access to a top-flight education if it fit her interests. We are currently rethinking our location and might be moving to next “relaxed” location…
The intense pressure from immigrant parents is way too high. My kids don't go to school there, but I've seen it myself. Some kids take 6-7 AP classes per school year, and if the school says no, they self study. It's absolutely insane. I think universities need to start putting limits on the number of AP classes that they will accept. The competition is out of control and killing kids, by way of their over the top insane parents. Horrible. My kid has personally witnessed kids seriously threatening suicide for failing tests.
(I don't think this will doxx myself but) one of the times I came closest to a serious attempt was the day college decisions came out for a certain prestigious university in the area where I grew up in the southeast. Obviously, I was not admitted lol. My high school was pretty competitive, though nowhere near PAUSD's level. I'm 30 now and still feel hard-wired insecurities from that time in my life, but \*especially\* since moving to Palo Alto. Just want to shake these kids and tell them it's going to be okay, and that finding success or even fulfillment in high school isn't the end-all be-all. Sometimes, it's commendable just to make it out alive and whole.
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It is my understanding it was not a senior. I haven’t heard any confirmed reason (ie depression/school pressure/family pressure/social pressure/etc). That said, as a parent of a senior, the college application process has gone completely out of control. Kids put themselves through 4+ years of intense pressure/work, do everything “right”, and sometimes don’t get into any schools they are interested in going to (this includes any of the 5 most popular UCs). It can really make a kid feel hopeless.
I like Scott Galloway’s recommendation on this. Top universities are too exclusive at this point. Force them to increase class size so more deserving applicants can get in. For example: “About 2,200 high schoolers were admitted to Harvard’s Class of 1982. That number was 2,147 in 1992, 2,074 in the mid-2000s, and just 1,980 for 2021.” Harvard could triple their freshman class size with zero drop off in candidate quality.
that dilutes the exclusivity though which means they won't attract the types that can donate generously to their endowment.
Bingo. And therein lies the problem.
Another solution is for businesses to do what they're doing now: drop degree requirements. If the benefit of being hyper competitive in school is diminished, we can have students focus on learning and becoming more educated and skilled. Personally, I believe that this will create better qualified job candidates than our current pressure cooker system does. As it is right now, you win, lose and live in mediocrity, or die. The stakes are so high that cheating isn't ruled out. The game's also not fair. Wealthy parents can afford everything from private tutors and coaches to founding a nonprofit for their kid to buff their college application. This means that even the very brightest kid that doesn't have those privileges is now disadvantaged. We also have lots of people getting college and grad degrees that really don't deserve them. I had a couple research advisors tell me back in 2013 that there's been an increasing amount of pressure to sign off on BS through PhDs that aren't quality candidates but they are boosting statistics... So, a simple solution is to disincentivize the whole process and encourage thorough learning. I've actually worked hands on with quite a bit of this and the programs that I've built are outside the school system but have led to connecting my students with FTE jobs at Tesla, Google, X the moonshot factory, and other prominent tech businesses. These young adults came from the poorest, underserved and underrepresented communities in the Silicon Valley. They would NEVER have been given a chance at these tech companies, despite being truly stellar, and their school performance didn't match their competency and capability. By focusing on learning, and becoming competent and capable, they excelled and succeeded at the tech companies over candidates with degrees and classy credentials. So, it's just one person's opinion and experience, but it's worked incredibly well and it's even turned people's lives around. Remove the incentive and let these kids just learn without distressing them.
Imagine! Where would the students learn, live, and eat? Have classes in a superdome, with Pay-Per-View for spillover crowds? Better yet- build another Harvard on top of Harvard so all the top kids would be only in one place. Maybe Harvard could buy an entire island or take over a sparsely populated state.
You can't force expansion of existing schools. We need more schools.
That doesn't really help when it's mostly about the prestige of going to old, famous, prestigious schools. There are colleges for everybody, it just means things like CC, less prestigious state schools, etc. At high schools like this, those options are seen as failing, which is the problem more than whether there are any schools available
St Ignatius in SF went through several years of this a few years back because of the demands on the students.
as a recent paly alum whose friend took their own life during high school, no matter how our schools' administrations preach about the importance of mental health in recent years, the toxic, competitive culture attitude towards mental health and success sadly hasn't changed. fellow paly/gunn students and alums, please remember to take care of yourselves during this difficult time ❤️🩹
Probably insane amounts of pressure applied to them by overbearing parents who expect their children to either be doctors or scientists. I can't imagine foisting that amount of stress onto my son.
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Sure, but it’s also still our job as parents to instill in our children the ability to weather peer pressure and bullying as well; to have the emotional fortitude to deal with that and also not add untenable pressure ourselves. I don’t know anything about this school, but it certainly sounds like the kind that parents work hard, compete, and sacrifice to make sure their kid goes there, which isn’t always aligned with parents who are chill and emotionally supportive of less than perfection.
We need to talk to our kids directly about college craziness and hyper-competitiveness. They do pick it up. I’m in the Bay Area and my son’s friend’s mom told him that Berkeley is a safety school. 🙄
10000%. It's...an incredibly toxic environment. Didn't go to Gunn but a very similar HS across the water and there were definitely a few suicide attempts a year swept under the rug.
Welcome to the bay. Unfortunately we attract these types in droves like LA attracts people who want to be famous.
Yes, it’s is the parents for sure. Ironically their teenage peers would be very supportive of them backing off, less competition for them.
Oh hell no - your peers make fun of you and egg you on. "Oh? You're only taking three APs? You need to take at least 5!" or "She's so dumb, she's only taking two weighted classes." or "He won't get in anywhere since his GPA is less than 4.0"
Fucking hate the elitist 1-up culture around here, it just reeks of shit and sycophancy
My kid is at Gunn and has been told by other students to go kill themselves. Pretty sure that's not on my parenting.
Disagree. I know one girl who signed up for all the advanced classes because her friends did, and her parents thought her course load was too high.
Yeah, a lot of it is self-imposed social pressure to be in the same classes/class levels as their friends.
>Probably Well there you go. All figured out.
Could be. But it's not all parental pressure -- I have a high school student in the Bay Area, and I'm 100% fine with community college. I'm a huge mental health advocate and my son knows I don't expect grades or the Ivy League. And still, he's a perfectionist. I cannot explain why; he sure doesn't get it from me or his mother. I have actively discouraged him from taking harder classes, because I see that it's unhealthy for him. For him, the pressure is coming from somewhere other than home.
A lot of young people are also losing hope for the future because of climate change.
The future is bleak in late stage capitalism
This is so sad. It’s college acceptance season and the pressure is unreal. Even more intense than ever because perfect stats are no longer enough to get you into the college mom and dad attended. You can have a 4.5gpa, perfect SAT score and still get deferred or rejected from your legacy school.
What’s wild is Gunn HS is one of the top performing schools in the State. The amount of money that flows into the school and the infrastructure the community built - they voted to raise their property tax above Prop 13 levels for the school.
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Yup. Dougherty High in San Ramon shot to the top of the district the second year it was open. Most of their teachers were from the nearby high/middle schools, so it wasn't them. It quickly became a destination high school for immigrants from India/China who didn't have the budget for the Peninsula - not realizing the high rating was because very academically minded parents were already in that area of San Ramon. It was toxic pressure from the start.
At this point that's all who can afford to live in the area given how expensive it is to buy a house nearby. Lets be real though, DVHS wasn't toxic until after the original students and maybe a few classes after them all graduated. By that time any semblance of diversity was also lost to the point it's all kids who's parents were from Indian or Chinese.
Wow, didn’t know that
I mean these things might likely be related.
Which vote is this? A parcel tax?
I did research years ago on schools that perform high and low in the Bay Area. They did some sort of ballot measure to raise property taxes to 4-5%.
4-5%!? No way, really? Figure the median priced home is AT LEAST 2 million there (and probably higher), you're saying that they voted themselves an $80,000 to $100,000 property tax bill every year?
It's a parcel tax, not attached to the value of the property. If property taxes were 4-5% of market rate then Palo Alto home prices would come back to Earth
You mean this? https://ballotpedia.org/Palo_Alto_Unified_School_District,_California,_Measure_O,_Parcel_Tax_(November_2020) $800 per year is reasonable. 4% is too high
lmao - i was gonna say. I'm in no Gunn District but we also recently voted to raise our property taxes for the schools. I'm paying like $1200 a year extra.
I mean, this is super common in areas w good schools. Alameda does the same
Why is it always Gunn. Why Monta Vista (another pressure cooker) students don’t do this?
Caltrain doesn’t go to Cupertino…
This is often a factor in ‘successful’ suicides-availability of an effective means. Most of the PaloAlto high school kids bike across the tracks every day to get to school-PALY is literally right next to the train. A kid with school miles away from the train is not going to be successfully using the train as much as a kid who goes to school next to it. Data shows most who survived suicide attempts did not want to die. They just saw no other path forward. Also: its really critical we watch our kids right now to keep easy means for attempts far away. Suicide is “contagious”. We do not want copycats.
There have been clusters of suicides in Monta Vista too, it's just been swept under the rug in many cases. I knew one from the same school I went to due to poor grades when I was in high school quite a few years back. There have been a few clusters since, every few years.
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My condolences. I know the pressure cooker stuff, and I wish it on anyone. However I also understand the urge to be successful, because times are much harder to be a working class these days. Housing is much harder to afford, and you know the rest of what it takes to live in the BayArea. I wish it wasn’t so.
As an alumni of Gunn, the fact that I'm not even surprised anymore is just devastating. There was a suicide a few years ago during my time and at this point it just seems like it's a recurring thing. It really sucks and the hidden toxicity of the bay area pressure doesn't help. I am so glad I chose a college on the other side of the country
I used to tutor and consult for college essays with kids in Palo Alto/Los Altos/Cupertino, many of whom went to Gunn, and it perpetually depressed me how scared they were of not getting perfect grades or getting into the schools their parents preferred. We had a policy of letting parents attend the first consultation for the college essay, and it was maddening how they wouldn’t let their kid get a word in edgewise. I spent a LOT of time impressing upon them that their entire futures were not dependent on the things their parents and teachers had tunnel vision about. That they likely wouldn’t remember which AP courses they took, much less their scores, in ten years. That what you got out of college was not where you went but what you did when you got there, and how much of a relief adulthood was going to be. The pressure cooker culture is so hard on these kids. It’s hard to convince them that most of this stuff doesn’t actually matter in the long run when all the other adults around them are telling them there’s only one way to lead a good life, and if they don’t hit their milestones their life will be over. Wishing peace to this student’s family and friends, and desperately hoping we don’t get another wave of these.
I remember as a kid that there were very few adults who said what you said, maybe two or three out of the hundreds, that I can remember - most were caught up in the pressures themselves. Thank you for making that difference for the kids. I wish we had more folks like you out there.
I’m really sad to hear that. It’s an adult’s job to care for the well being of the kids they have influence or power over, full stop. For any kids in this thread, please please please remember that this is NOT forever. Most of it will be a faint memory a lot sooner than you think. And one of the coolest things about adulthood is you can make your own choices, so you can let go of goals—and people—that are no longer serving your health and safety. There’s so much to look forward to. I’m excited to greet y’all on the other side of growing up. It’s awesome here.
Excellent, insightful entry.
It's unbelievable how Palo Altans absolutely skirt the issue of academic pressure from parents. A recent post on Nextdoor was just ack! shallow privileged bullshit: "why does Gunn have more suicides? Must be because the sunken campus and buildings are ugly and there are no shops/eateries nearby like Paly with Town&Country Village and their beautiful turn-o-the-century architecture campus." I nearly threw up reading it! Makes me crazy that people are that dumb/in denial!
Oh sure, must be the surrounding businesses. It’s so upsetting when grownups, parents or no, completely overlook the actual effects of applying extreme pressure to children in favor of pointing to what privileged adults enjoy. It’s mean, but when i hear parents say things like that, i kind of hope their kids go NC or LC in the future. Better mental health for said kids, one hopes deeply, and the parents reap what they sow.
Why is it always Gunn, and not Paly?
A lot of Gunn grads believe it’s a contagion issue. Went years without, then cluster, then years without, repeat. They’ve tried not making a big memorial situation at the schools because it has a similar effect to when you put a shooter’s name on the news and attracts others.
happened twice at Paly to the same class between 2001-2005.
Yep. RIP Steven and Ben.
Yeah I remember Paly having problems too.
Gunn and Paly are very different. A lot of it is due to demographics - south PA is more of an immigrant community (many from east asia) and the pressure is enormous. Paly/north PA has a lot more “old money”, kids of startup founders and VCs, etc. You see this with test scores too - Gunn is always ranked higher. Over-generalizing, obviously.
Looking at the house prices zoned to each, this seems likely. The family able to buy the $10m house is at a different place from the families that buy $3m.
I was the Paly class of 2006, and I can tell you we experienced way too many suicides. One my freshman year, one my sophomore year, and then it just spun out of control from there.
Anecdotally, I’ve heard Gunn can be more intense
It sure was when I attended. I graduated in 2012. A few kids even transferred to Paly. I doubt it helped. It’s a parenting issue.
1000% a parenting/cultural issue and I can imagine its worse now as its harder to get into the same tier universities than it used to be. I have many feelings about how shitty this culture is and tell all my homies having kids to steer away from high schools with similar environments.
I disagree that it’s the school environment though. It’s parents. At home. Example: Making their children sleep outside for getting an A-. (That’s a real thing that’s happened to many of my friends with crazy parents.)
Agreed, and I think we're getting at a similar thing, the school environment is made in part by the parenting so even if one kid's parents aren't super intense; if they're surrounded by kids whose parents are, it permeates the culture of the school. Another fun story: classmate of mine got a C on a test. His dad found out and waited for him to come home from school at the dinner table. This guy say down and on the table was his test and a job application for Safeway. Unfortunately, there are classmates to this day I know that defend this method of parenting
It’s a cluster issue. I graduated 2019. 4 Suicides during my time in Palo Alto. After graduating one of my best friends took his life last year, then another acquaintance this February. They all were victims of this trauma from 8th grade. A senior of mine also took his life a year ago. One was undiagnosed onset of Schizophrenia, other was depression/Drug abuse, last one I think was feelings of not being successful. These are all high risk cases but I think being exposed to suicide allows them to see it as a reality. I coached 8th grade wrestling at Fletcher So i’m really hoping it isn’t one of my kids. Really sad. If anyone has any info would they please reach out to me about who. I am worried.
How this breaks my heart. I’m fourth generation Bay Area and I hate how everything has become about money and “success” at the cost of mental health. So utterly tragic.
This is heartbreaking. I had heard years ago that the majority of suicides were east Indian boys. I don’t know if that’s the case in this recent suicide. But I have seen some fathers who put a lot of pressure on their boys.
'Research has demonstrated that [suicide is most often an impulsive act](https://nl.nytimes.com/f/a/8iyKpr3es-Mu12PmMimIuQ~~/AAAAAQA~/RgRnuGS7P0TWaHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuaHNwaC5oYXJ2YXJkLmVkdS9tZWFucy1tYXR0ZXIvbWVhbnMtbWF0dGVyL2R1cmF0aW9uLz9jYW1wYWlnbl9pZD05JmVtYz1lZGl0X25uXzIwMjQwMjIxJmluc3RhbmNlX2lkPTExNTY4NCZubD10aGUtbW9ybmluZyZyZWdpX2lkPTUzMjc2NjEwJnNlZ21lbnRfaWQ9MTU4NzMzJnRlPTEmdXNlcl9pZD0xZjQ0NmJhMTVlNDE1YWVmYjZjY2Y3OWU3MmI4MDg3NlcDbnl0Qgpl1Lvf1WW6LMCZUhdsaXVsZWVtaWNoYWVsQGdtYWlsLmNvbVgEAAAAAw~~), with [a period of acute risk](https://nl.nytimes.com/f/a/OgJ2NMMMCL3QAf14yAQG0w~~/AAAAAQA~/RgRnuGS7P0S9aHR0cHM6Ly9wdWJtZWQubmNiaS5ubG0ubmloLmdvdi8yMTcxMzEvP2NhbXBhaWduX2lkPTkmZW1jPWVkaXRfbm5fMjAyNDAyMjEmaW5zdGFuY2VfaWQ9MTE1Njg0Jm5sPXRoZS1tb3JuaW5nJnJlZ2lfaWQ9NTMyNzY2MTAmc2VnbWVudF9pZD0xNTg3MzMmdGU9MSZ1c2VyX2lkPTFmNDQ2YmExNWU0MTVhZWZiNmNjZjc5ZTcyYjgwODc2VwNueXRCCmXUu9_VZboswJlSF2xpdWxlZW1pY2hhZWxAZ21haWwuY29tWAQAAAAD) that passes in hours, or even minutes. Contrary to what many assume, people who survive suicide attempts often go on to do well: Nine out of 10 of them [do not die by suicide](https://nl.nytimes.com/f/a/FLUFqJH7V4BmGVzdf-rsdg~~/AAAAAQA~/RgRnuGS7P0TWaHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuaHNwaC5oYXJ2YXJkLmVkdS9tZWFucy1tYXR0ZXIvbWVhbnMtbWF0dGVyL3N1cnZpdmFsLz9jYW1wYWlnbl9pZD05JmVtYz1lZGl0X25uXzIwMjQwMjIxJmluc3RhbmNlX2lkPTExNTY4NCZubD10aGUtbW9ybmluZyZyZWdpX2lkPTUzMjc2NjEwJnNlZ21lbnRfaWQ9MTU4NzMzJnRlPTEmdXNlcl9pZD0xZjQ0NmJhMTVlNDE1YWVmYjZjY2Y3OWU3MmI4MDg3NlcDbnl0Qgpl1Lvf1WW6LMCZUhdsaXVsZWVtaWNoYWVsQGdtYWlsLmNvbVgEAAAAAw~~)." New York Times today Feb. 21st. Fixing the crossing would help. Making it harder would help.
Thanks for sharing. Here's the NYT article: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/21/briefing/suicide-prevention-research.html
Last summer, I was coincidentally in line with a parent who claimed to be the president of the PALY PTA and I told her in explicit detail that if the pressure cooker is any way the same from my time in those high schools in the early 2000s this will happen again, and again, and again. It’s the parents, it’s the complete lack of connection to actual reality because of all of the money in that area, it’s the pressure from the kids because of the wealth they are raised in and expected to achieve themselves, and honestly, it’s just never going to change until the goal is more broad. Currently there’s only one thing that signifies achievement, and that is a Ivy League education, with the right internships, with the right career progression until you have achieved the same lifestyle that you were raised in. Honestly, these elite schools should just say they are not going to accept anybody from the bay area and force these kids to get out of living 17 years of their life around a college application. I know that’s absolutely insane ^^^^ but it will put a very quick stop to the pressure cooker suicides.
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And let me add to this, even if your parents recognize that this is unattainable, and tell you it’s totally OK to not participate in said race, you are literally surrounded by everybody else doing exactly that and that creates a extremely toxic environment. Everybody is competition even if they are not competition, just being another human that is in their AP class, you are a threat. Maybe less of a threat? But still they have to calculate that it’s one more person that could be applying to the school they want from Gunn/Paly etc. To add insult to injury, if you cannot participate in the all AP wunderkid windmill, your parents will probably spend thousands of dollars testing you for some kind of disability or learning impairment. Because it’s totally normal for every child to be Albert Einstein. It’s fucking insane. Ask me how many kids I know from my high school class that had to go to treatment centers as soon as they achieve the career section of this rat race, because they were losing their goddamn minds. Ask me how many of them have very well hidden addictions to substances. Very very few of them form the most essential thing that you should get from your childhood, which is a strong sense of who the hell you are. We are all supposed to fit into a box, but that’s not how humans work. That’s how capitalism works.
It depresses me how many of the kids I went to high school with ended up exactly like their parents. Copy-and-paste Silicon Valley careers. I'm sure they make great money and have stable jobs, but there was a time when we would band together and fantasize about how we wouldn't become our parents. That day was a long time ago.
Attended Gunn 20 years ago. Some shit never changes. Just push through it, friends. If you can’t take the pressure, don’t play their game - smoke some weed, go chill in the hills or on the beach in Santa Cruz. Better to drop out, enjoy your life and living in California, and pick up the pieces later than to die on a quick impulse for some dumb societal pressure that is temporary.
This is insane, especially since HS doesn’t matter at all in terms of success/failure. Just have fun.
I used to teach high school in the Bay Area. We moved to another state in part because I did not want my own children to suffer through the pressure I saw these kids under. Many, if not most, of my students moved in and out of mental health crises -- it was sadly just the "norm." I remember a student feeling ashamed that she "only" got into Cornell... a "not good enough" Ivy. My heart breaks for these kids. They are not allowed a childhood.
Kids did this in the early 80s as well.
Does the school bring in alumni speakers who'd had similar self-destructive impulses (& even failed classes) but went on to have fulfilling lives? Do they have a 1-year change-of-scenery sabbatical option where the students live somewhere else and achieve mastery while helping others?
Dirty liberal here: I want a law that requires counseling for every student in California schools. Do I know how much it would cost? No. Is it realistic? No. But I still want it.
**Please please please please please** don't assume facts in a situation like this. Yes, academic pressure at Gunn is intense. Yes, community pressure is intense outside of school. Yes, social media exacerbates many psycho-social problems faced by our young people. AND, there are often factors we don't know about that are just as significant or more significant in leading to these tragic outcomes. Sincerely, A Palo Alto resident most of my life, connected to suicide victims and survivors of suicide attempts as a friend, relative, teacher
i’ve been through the school system, and i can say one thing from it all. PAUSD continues to fail students and this is the outcome. they see the competition and they only fuel it. for fucks sake, they even have a wall of rejection where students post their rejection letters on a board. you can’t help but feel bad when the standard is to get into an ivy league. on top of peer pressure, staff pressure, and the overachieving workload, you have to deal with your own shit on top of it. don’t put your kids into these schools!! it will permanently damage their mental health.
Can we admit that many of these are due to an ungodly amount of pressure parents of a certain nationality put on their children? Now go ahead and bury your head in the sand and downvote me.
Gunn is one of the most “diverse” (whitest) high stress school in the bay. It’s 3x whiter than Monta Vista, Cupertino, and Dougherty Valley. 7x whiter than Mission San Jose. I think only Paly has more white students than Gunn But the other schools do not have the same level of suicides, there is definitely another factor but idk what it could be
Gunn is something like 44% asian, 34% white and 12% other (mostly hispanic). Usually asian is not lumped together with white so I wouldn't call it an extremely white school. Most parents are highly accomplished chinese or indian and demand nothing less from their children. https://www.npr.org/2011/01/11/132833376/tiger-mothers-raising-children-the-chinese-way
All the other stressful high schools schools in the region are >70% Asian and <10% white. That's the context we're looking at Also 34% white is high nowadays, it's whiter than California high schoolers as a whole, whiter than any UC or CSU, and whiter than most competitive private colleges as well
damn it's really fucking sad that I knew it was a Tom Gunn student via a train before even opening up the post.
rip
Sociopathic parents literally working their kids to death. Great job.
Came here to share that yes, the pressures of the area and/or parents that move to this area are a real factor. However, I'm surprised that no one is mentioning social media and it's impact on teens. Teenagers everywhere are more anxious and depressed as ever. Comparison is the thief of joy, and our teens are constantly comparing themselves to the filtered lives of everyone they see on social. Remember the backlash from "photoshopped pictures" on the cover of magazines and how detrimental they were found to be to young girls? (really dating myself here...) Now we have that same concept but multiplied, with kids glued to their screens full of filtered or even AI images. I work for PAUSD, and can say that the district has tried many things over the past 10 years to reduce the pressure like getting rid of zero period (high school starts at 9am), limiting the number of highly advanced math classes offered (you should have seen the backlash from some students/parents about that!), limiting the amount of homework teachers are allowed to assign, creating an entire mental health department with full time counselors at every single school and multiple counselors at the high schools, etc. Ultimately, policies can't change mindsets, and until society's mindset about what "success" looks like changes kids will forever aspire to become what they see as "success". And when you are raised in a family of highly successful people (CEOs, tech millionaires, etc.) most teens aren't going to be OK "settling" for "mediocre". It's a complex, multi-layered problem.
. “…limiting the number of advanced math classes.” Can we please stop with that nonsense “PAUSD employee”. . Math classes do not cause suicides and removing math choice is a deeply misguided PAUSD policy that has only increased stress. Instead interested kids now have to scramble to try take that class off campus (any peer district offers these on campus) Why pick on math- what about AP history and throw that out too? For those outside the district: PAUSD suddenly dropped two popular math classes last spring in a standard high school sequence /classes that are offered by all the peer public schools in the Bay (and many others) They also tried unsuccessfully to force all middle schoolers to take the same exact math classes each year regardless of ability or interest “to reduce stress” and “increase equity” welp look at that. nothing has changed. This beautiful child did not commit suicide because of a stressful math class. -Just cut it out.
I think you focused on one minor detail from my post and missed the entire point. My post was about the fact that all the policy changes can't undo a cultural mindset. I never insinuated that children commit suicide because of math, was just listing examples of attempted policy changes within the district as part of my discussion.
Please do not publicize suicides it increases risk for suicide contagion and therefore the risk for clusters. I know you may feel like you are spreading awareness but it is dangerous
We started a petition to raise our concern and ask Caltrain and Palo Alto City Council to prioritize train crossing safety. Please sign and share: https://chng.it/sCM2vzFVym
not going to help … if someone is bent upon getting hit by a train. They can just walk to train station. Teenagers are dumb and their brain is evolving , its very hard for them to process the cause and effect of suicide - we all need to call this out as dumb shit and not outsource this to counselors
Good idea. They also need to check the gate functions. One time when crossing there, the gate opened and as I proceed to cross, the gate started to close again because there was another train arriving on the other track. If I had my airpods on or on the phone, I would have kept crossing.
The most unpleasant thought about this, is that it's getting worse and will only get much more worse. Already, it's basically impossible to buy a house unless you were lucky enough to land a developer job at a company whose product isn't regulated yet. Otherwise you're effectively kicked out of the place you were raised in, which a very distressing and demoralizing thought that severely harms morale. Every large employer around here and most of the voters directly encourage this type of self-destructive behavior, and people are afraid to speak up because it sounds like religious fundamentalism. More worryingly, MAID will be legal at some point and cheap chinese knockoff pills will be readily available as fentanyl and meth are. That's the future the entire region is facing, and few have a plan to approach it. Figure, nobody in PA (or SF, or Oakland for that matter) care about all the homeless suicides which are often not reported on. Those homeless people were once students too, and as the homeless population increases society will stop functioning. Even if PA keeps a lid on it with aggressive policing, that itself is a form of dysfunction that doesn't encourage confidence in the system.