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When I was starting my first year of grad studies at NYU, they gave my class a tour of the major buildings, including Bobst Library. We went up to the 8th floor and peered over the banister at the dizzying pattern of marble in the floor, and the guide told us that the banister verticals had been designed to look like crosses, to make students think twice about jumping. Even though they've had plexiglass barriers on those floors since 2005, he managed to climb over them.

I'm not going to draw the larger picture of the hopelessness of so many people this guy's age, but we're doing something wrong.

This made me so sad when I read it the other day.

I don't have any answers, but I do agree that we're doing something wrong. And I hope somebody somewhere can help find an answer... or a call.... or something.

Loud thud and all.

We're doing something wrong? I see nothing in the article to suggest that Williamson-Noble's death was caused by anybody but himself. I don't need to tell you, of all people, that life is not fair.

Perhaps our society has become so value-neutral that young people often do feel they exist in a sort of vacuum. Individual choice is, for most of them, the Prime Directive. That certainly contributes to anomie, and in some cases, might feed into an underlying pathology. But I don't know what the hell anybody is going to do about it. Do you feel like standing on a street corner with a sign reading, "REPENT OR DIE"?

that's what I do on weekends. Except it's more like: raise your kids in a warm, respectful and learning rich environment and teach them to think for themselves, to be resourceful and self disciplined. OR DIE.

One almost wishes there was a deep dark explanation of some kind, an "Oh, so that's why" silver bullet or somesuch. Otherwise, it could become an epidemic, this sort of "Ah, I've had enough for now" youthful acting out. It''s the climate for it.

I read once about Germany under sway of the romantics. Hordes of youths, alone or as couples or groups, swelled with Schiller or something, chose an aesthetic, almost whimsical suicide like today's kids decide on a tattoo.

to conclusions. Who has not been robbed of their childhood dreams by public anomie number one - the pressure to succeed? Whatever that means. What is life without dreams? The only way I made it through higher education was by getting even higher. Ok, I lied. I never made it through higher education. I wasn't about to waste money on people who tried to teach me that cats don't have souls and that studying Dante's hallucinations wasn't in and of itself a recursive journey into yet another level of a Hell that exists only in tortured souls. And personally, I find libraries depressing. All those works by the greatest minds of mankind, bound and stacked row upon row and then categorically decimated by Dewey's repressive system.

described at length in the Borges short story, The Library At Babel. Every theoretical combination of letters, words, and languages presented in shelf-pods of perfect, endless geometrical symmetry. Patrons wander their days out in the merest fraction of the stacks.

Nowadays we might as well rewrite it as The Library At Google. Someone talented probably is already at work on that conception.

Suicide is the third leading cause of death in people age 15-24, and the sixth leading cause of death for kids from 5-14. Yes, that's FIVE to 14. What the hell?

feeling hopeless or desperate, etc. versus the German romantic kids saying, "Heck, why not. It's kinda the cool thing to do, like the people we've read about" ??

are exhibiting a "heck why not?" attitude is over played. Sorry, but I just do.

I'm not sure that it is as simple as "depressives" or "feeling hopeless" ... I believe there is a deep despair in our culture that is finding an outlet in the self-destruction of our kids.

It really is "our" problem. Whether any individual wants to see it that way or not. Rugged individualism may be our cultural malaise and I see that in the rugged individualism that says "it hasn't happened to my kid so it has nothing to do with me." In my personal opinion that is an integral part of the problem -- isolation felt so deeply, and so darkly, that self-destruction seems the only viable alternative.

Look at Iso's statistics again -- ages FIVE to FOURTEEN. They do not have "German romantic notions" at those ages. Sorry, but they don't.

later in life. Maybe I'm generalizing too much from anecdotal evidence, or from the artistic license others have taken. I thought of the German thing because many of those kids were imitating the "aesthetic" gestures of some of their heroes. Some years ago a cousin of mine hung herself at age twelve because that's what Michael Hutchence of INXS had done. Ugh. But in all likelihood despair is the prime lover. That makes the most "sense"....

I don't know. Whether they do or not, I also don't know. Very few young people leave notes, or details of their feelings. This may be why they end up taking such an irrevocable step - because they can't seem to articulate what it is that is so out of kilter. I don't know.

But I do know that keeping a tidy distance from it is probably a lot like throwing a book I don't actually like on a bonfire of other books. Doesn't cost me much and surely it can't be harmful, right?

Perhaps fearful or despondent about the future?

The question is, how does that happen, that someone gives up on life at that point? I had a college boyfriend tell me he tried to kill himself at age 6 because he was afraid the devil would make him sin and he thought that was the only way to save himself. Jesus. I suppose in an earlier time, if the college bf had gone through with it the right way, he'd have been beatified.

Kids don't have the same emotional and intellectual resources that adults do, but we bombard them with extremely adult information before they're ready to understand it, and we don't help them cope with it by teaching them the skills they need to function in the face of it.

There was an excellent article in the New Yorker awhile back about suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge. The author did some research and found out that about 90% of people who fail at a suicide attempt never try again, and regret having chosen it at all. That's hopeful.

I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't some element of that involved in depression.

Take the brain of someone who is in a fragile/developmental state. Subject that brain to the low levels of psychoactive drugs in all major cities water supplies, the estrogen from putting plastics in the microwave, whatever cell phone towers are doing to our brains (...etc.) and you'd expect that more people and up with neurological problems, some of which will be depression. It's the unfortunate outcome of "progress".