A month after the Marin community was shaken by two teen suicides, a capacity crowd of 200 turned out Wednesday in Mill Valley for a special screening of “Not Alone,” a Marin-produced film on suicide prevention.
Kentfield resident Kiki Goshay, producer and director of the film, told the audience at the Mill Valley Community Center that the key to suicide prevention is communication — specifically asking and listening.
It’s for that reason that there are no statistics on teen suicide splashed in text across the screen in “Not Alone,” she said. There are no interviews with parents or with experts on the issue. All the audience sees and hears are the experiences of teens who have been bereaved by a classmate’s death or who have themselves struggled with suicidal thoughts.
“The more I watched their video, the more I said, OK, that’s it. … We are just going to listen to teens,” Goshay said of the making of the film. “And every word that’s in there (aside from scripted narration) … came right from their mouths. If you just ask the right questions and really be quiet and listen, they will tell us what we need to know.”
SUICIDE AWARENESS > MORE COVERAGE
To that, event moderator Michael Pritchard, a teen advocate, mentor and motivational speaker, said, “Listening is love, folks, and it’s what many depressed people are looking for.”
Pritchard said there needs to be a community dialogue about suicide, to destigmatize depression and mental health issues.
Urgent issue
Teen suicide is becoming an urgent issue in Marin. This past December two seniors, at Novato and Sir Francis Drake high schools, took their lives. There were no teen suicide deaths reported in Marin County in 2016, according to the Marin County Department of Health and Human Services. Two were reported in 2014; five in 2013, according to the agency.
Since the local filming of the Netflix TV series “13 Reasons Why”, teen suicide has been a high-profile topic. After the first season aired, Marin educators, parents and students held numerous discussions on ways to avoid glamorizing the issue and encouraging teens to seek help from friends, family and counselors.
Buckelew Programs, which provides mental health and addiction services, sponsored the screening of “Not Alone,” which is also available on Netflix, to offer the community understanding of teen suicide from a teen point of view. Program partners included Kaiser Permanente, the Marin County Office of Education and the Marin County Sheriff’s Office.
Share struggles
Tamara Player, CEO of Buckelew Programs, introduced the film, explaining that suicide could affect anyone.
She said she lost two friends to suicide, and that she was unaware that two of her own children struggled with suicidal thoughts while going through high school, until one of her son’s friends asked.
“Because of community conversation the friend dared to ask him and then that led to having a conversation with us,” Player said. “If that friend hadn’t done that, I don’t know that our son would be here today.”
“Not Alone,” which runs 50 minutes, tells the story of the Marin teen filmmaker Jacqueline Monetta, whose best friend killed herself at 16.
Monetta, driven by a desire to understand why her friend took her own life, invites teens who are suffering to share their struggles with mental illness and suicide attempts. Through one-on-one interviews, the film uncovers feelings and thoughts about depression, anxiety, self-harm, suicide attempts, getting help and treating mental illness. It reveals that teens feel constant pressure to fit in, which is exacerbated by social media and cyber bullying. Goshay discovered that teens were more afraid to talk about drinking than they were to talk about other self-harm, such as cutting and burning themselves. Members of the audience suggested that a systemic change is needed so that teens are not afraid of being punished, or hurting or shaming their parents.
Other causes
Dr. Paul Katz, who works in pediatrics at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in San Rafael, thanked Goshay for the film, but wanted to point out that “teenage suicide is not a homogeneous thing.”
He said that sleep deprivation, early classes and heavy homework loads have been proven to be contributing factors to suicide rates.
“It is not just chronically depressed teenagers with underlying mental health problems, it could be a sudden impulsive event that has no underlying (problem) whatsoever,” he said.
After seeing the film and hearing the discussion, Julie Soja, a Tiburon mother of three teens, said the documentary was a nice contrast to the “glittery” dramatization of “13 Reasons Why.”
“It was good to hear from real teens about their experiences,” she said.
David Weinfeld, a Mill Valley parent of two teens, said “The terms mental health and depression are shunned, quieted like the use of ‘fever’ in the 15th century. It shouldn’t be that way, it needs to be spoken about without stigma, without judgment.”
Goshay said that the goal of her film is to create this dialogue and engagement.
Buckelew’s local suicide prevention hotline is 415-499-1100 or 855-587-6373. There is also a 24/7 Crisis Text Line: Text 741741, or go to crisistextline.org.
