Breskin, D. "The story of Scott Difiglia, other teenagers who consider suicide the best revenge." Rolling Stone, November 8, 1984, p. 31.

OVERVIEW

It’s all here in a most perceptive article—the detailed story of an 18-year-old suicide (from that ideal Dallas suburb which experienced a string of suicides in 1983), the final suicide note, girlfriend, effect on family and friends, statistics, and quotes from other cases—with sensitivity, realism, and insight.

In one study, 34% of teens said they "seriously considered" suicide; 32% said they had made plans; and 14% went so far as to say they’d made an attempt (roughly 9 of every 10 teenage attempters know another attempter). Another study found 20% of teens claiming that they were "empty, confused, and would rather die than live." A survey of high-school and college students asked the question, "do you think suicide among young people is ever justified?" Forty-nine percent said, "Yes."

The plain, simple truth is that no one knows why people commit suicide…To account for the stunning increase in youth suicide, a second question must be answered: What makes Johnny more prone to kill himself in 1984 than in 1954?

There are many so-called reasons—sociological, psychological, economic, technological, historical, anthropological, biochemical, and philospohical—that account for the distrastrous condition in which we find our hypothetical Johnny in 1984.

First, chances are, Johnny’s parents are divorced. Suicides come disproportionately from broken homes, and the increase in young suicides parallels the giddy divorce rate, now over 50% and the highest in the world. Married or divorced, Johnny’s mother works outside the home. She prides herself on how quickly she returns to work after Johnny is born. (That the father is absent or away at work is a given.) His parents subcontract responsibility for raising Johnny to day-care surrogates, nurses, and sitters—and to Johnny himself. As a result, he may not have "bonded" with his mother when he was an infant—a deprivation some psychologists think critical in the late development of suicidal teens. There’s no extended family around for him, not with the geographical mobility for which Amercians are famous. The moving is hard on him. He must keep readapting to new environments. One teen in Houston treed himself and left a note: "This is the only thing around here that has any roots."

American parents spend less time with Johnny than any other parents in the world. While he’s a teenager, his parents spend an average of 14 minutes a week communicating with him. By the time Johnny graduates from high school, he’ll have spent more time with his blue, flickering, electronic parent than doing anything else but sleeping: he’ll have seen 20,000 hours of TV, 350,000 commercials, and about 18,000 killings. The family doesn’t have to talk, they watch. On TV, problems resolve themselves in 30-minute spans. It’s his only problem-solving role model, and it’s unrealistic.

That his life is not as exciting as the life on TV may come as a disappointment. His pain comes as a nasty shock, and he’ll learn to escape rather than cope. He has far more access to booze, dope, pills, and coke than any previous generation of kids, and at an earlier age. He also has easy access to the genitals of the opposite sex, and the sooner he scores, the more difficulty he’ll have with intimacy later on. Chances are increasing that he will be sexually or physically abused by an adult at an early age.

Competition is tremendous. If he is middle- or upper-class, his parents have already told him he had better start running, and fast, because the pie is shrnking. The number of his peers has doubled in 20 years, but the opportunities haven’t. There are only so many spots on the basketball team or in the law firm. He feels pressure to be perfect…

Johnny learns quickly that good grades and other tangible achievements are the currency in which he trades for his parents’ approval and concomitant permissiveness….His parents are permissive because it’s easier to say yes than no. Besides, they don’t know what rules are vaild anymore. Everything in this world is negotiable now: everything is a shade of gray, and all that matters is green. They treat the kid like a little adult because they want him to be a little adult. They seek his "friendship" and fear his disapproval. When they give him too much freedom, he secretly desires rules; but they don’t want to tell him about sex, about values, pain, problems solving, and living with limitations. All is uncertain, nothing is shocking, everything is tolerated. Even suicide, with each passing example, becomes less taboo.

All told, Johnny 1984 lives in a bizarre warp of freedom and pressure at a state of his life when neither is appropriate: when pressure makes him brittle and freedom is just another word for everything to lose.

Scott C. Difiglia’s last note read: "Dear Mom, Dad, Church, Family, & Friends, I am sorry I am running from a problem that is nobody’s fault but mine…I didn’t do this because it’s a new fad in Plano, I just couldn’t take the pain inside me. I really hate myself for everything I’ve done…"

The Rolling Stone article is a must-read on this serious subject.

Dean Borgman cCYS