Tragedy, Truth and The Blame Game

It’s so easy to blame. When nothing is clear, when times are hard, when everyone wants an answer and no one has one, confronting difficult situations head on seems to be the last thing remotely possible.

When kids die, the instinct to blame follows; it’s hard to believe a teenager would take their own life. We insist on a backstory, a deeper explanation as to why these bad things happen. Seemingly good kids will get into trouble, and it has to be someone’s fault. Students at Naperville North needed something to blame when their classmates died from suicide.

A suicide death is not something many teenagers — or even adults — know how to handle. When a peer died last January, it was a punch in the gut, a slap in the face. Some of us picked each other up, others mourned for a while longer; for some there was an illusion of moving on.

Then the Chicago Tribune published an article with a polarizing headline stating “‘They scared him to death.’”

They tried to tell our story. They found antagonists and heroes and told the community a drama-filled narrative from only one point of view.

After another death in April, a petition was created by NNHS student Tessa Newman claiming the school’s academic pressures were the reason for the students’ deaths.

“When there is only one path to success, a path that almost no one can follow, we all feel like failures. That is why this keeps happening,” Newman said in her petition.

Newman’s “that”– why suicides kept happening — cannot be identified, especially not by any one student. No matter how many scapegoats are created to fill in the blanks, there is never a way to truly know why. There is no way to know what was going through those boys’ minds.

After losing another classmate in September, The North Star tried to find something or someone to blame, just like our fellow students and nationwide newspapers. Academic pressure and police officers are easy culprits when something goes wrong. But as the tragedies kept coming, it became apparent that, in reality, there is not one single problem.

And there is not one single answer.

We will never know the true stories, and we have to accept that. We can search for answers; more articles can be written with varying opinions on what happened in January, April and September. But we will never be certain. Instead of dwelling on those months, our time and energy should be spent on working toward a better future.

In order to do this, we must break the vicious cycle of blame. As the pain seemed to be subsiding for some after the student death in September, it all came rushing back with another article. The Chicago Tribune published a story using the “pressure culture” and suicide deaths at a big school as a news hook. The story reignited the urge to point fingers, most prevalently at Naperville North’s administration.

Some expected school officials to magically take away the pain in the wake of the student deaths. That was an unfair expectation. At the same time, The North Star believes our administrators needed to be more responsive in acknowledging the suffering that students felt. The school has improved in its response to suicide deaths, but they need to be more prepared if another suicide happens.

According to Gary Roe, author of “Teen Grief: Caring for the Teenage Grieving Heart,” one way to address teen deaths from suicide is to simply address the elephant in the room. This scares some people because they are worried bringing up the topic of suicide will have a negative effect on grieving students. However, Roe believes that since suicide is a private act, making it more public is a possible way to prevent future deaths.

“It is best to lob it out there and talk about [the suicide death]. Talking about it is not going to cause someone to think about it because they’re thinking about it already,” Roe said.

We must try to do better. We must be more honest. There may be no individual culprit, but we all have a responsibility to reflect and take action. We need to not only push administration to educate us on mental illness and warning signs, but also take the initiative to make change for ourselves.

Talk with your friends; understand them and listen to them. Educate yourself on mental illness. Know the warning signs of suicide. We don’t want another tragedy, but we must prepare ourselves and react in more constructive ways, both for ourselves and our community.

The community has taken some action steps, notably the Focus 203 held on Nov. 30 that had a remarkable turnout from members of the community. Now with this obvious desire from the community to take action, we must actually act. We must work harder than ever before to prevent this from happening again.

This story was written by Audrey Iocca, Julia Donofrio, Hannah Jorstad, Maddie Krebs, Kate Putman, and Jacob de Waard with help and input from The North Star staff.