crazy/pitiful

In Kansas, little kids are killing themselves.

The hard facts came out this spring: From 1989 to 1998, 41 kids between the ages of ten and fourteen said goodbye to their parents forever. The state health department’s suicide statistics showed that the number of kids who killed themselves doubled in the second half of that decade.

Researchers start counting when kids are only five. What could possibly cause a five-year-old to think about suicide?

“My first attempt was when I was eight,” says Jacques-Pierre Cole, who’s now 27 and gives speeches on the topic. His parents were divorcing, he hated his mother and his father was abusive, so he jumped off an apartment balcony. That was just the beginning of “a journey of many attempts” to destroy himself. “I tried to wreck my moped into the back of a car. I did a lot of cutting myself, self-mutilation.” One day at school, he ate 26 muscle relaxers. With therapy, Cole eventually began to win his battle with depression. The key was learning to express his feelings — a skill he didn’t have as a kid.

“When I was eight years old, it wasn’t necessarily that I wanted to die. A lot of times a child is just dealing with a lot of pain. You’re thinking, ‘This will stop the pain right now. Period, it’s done.'”

Cole, along with his colleagues at the Mental Health Association of the Heartland, kicked off a teen suicide prevention campaign in May. Calling itself the ANSWER (Adolescents Never Suicide When Everyone Responds) Network, the group of mental health organizations, schools and universities set up training sessions for adults, parents and young people. They launched a Web site (teenanswer.org), with personal stories and information about what to do when a kid shows signs of depression. And using a striking ad designed pro bono by the Valentine Radford agency, they put up billboards and pasted posters in bathroom stalls (“Because that’s where you go when you’re upset”) at schools and churches.

The group also wanted to run its ad before trailers at AMC movie theaters, so it contacted the National Cinema Network, a wholly owned subsidiary of AMC that handles the ads at theaters. The ANSWER Network’s Joyce Schmidt Estéban says her group knew that most kids who go to movies watch them at AMC theaters, and NCN’s materials backed that up.

“Thrills, chills, love and laughs … there is something for everyone at the movies!” read a fax they received from NCN’s sales rep. “Attached find a six-week proposal for the Johnson County locations. These theaters pull an average of 100,000 captive moviegoers each week from a radius of about 10-20 miles. And with NCN’s incredible next day recall of 62%, these movie patrons will remember your ad.”

But movie patrons wouldn’t get to see the ANSWER Network’s ad. “They said, ‘Sorry, it’s too controversial,'” Estéban says. “I think we were all in shock.”

Estéban says NCN never saw the ad, but she “gave them a description of the casket and the verbage. It does, as the kids say, hit you in the face.”

That’s what kids need. But it’s too disturbing for AMC — even though the company has no reservations about putting all of those “in your face” movie images on its screens.

“AMC does not evaluate the advertiser; they evaluate the content of the ads,” says NCN’s Laura Adler. “It has to be appropriate for all ages because obviously the ad will run on all the screens, for a general audience. Also, the message has to be compatible with the moviegoing experience. The majority of people are looking to escape some of the harder things in life, so the messages that are onscreen should be positive and entertaining.”

The twisted idea that a suicide-prevention ad may be too upsetting is the kind of logic that may keep kids killing themselves. It’s hard to fight suicide because of that stigma, says the Mental Health Association’s Susan Crain Lewis.

“In some communities, the coroner, when faced with a death that could be a suicide, will report it as an accident,” she says. Moreover, there’s no reliable reporting system for attempts. “If you wind up in the emergency room, the hospital may list it as a drug overdose rather than a suicide attempt. If parents come home, call the poison center and induce vomiting, they’re under no obligation to report it as an attempted suicide.”

At least a quarter of the kids walking down school hallways have seriously considered suicide in the past year, Lewis says. And, she says, “there’s another group we need to think about: School shooters are suicidal.”

Most people think of those shooters as homicidal sociopaths. But Lewis points to last October’s Secret Service report, which concluded that all of them were clinically depressed. “Kids are standing there waiting for cops to come and get them. One of the reasons [their depression] doesn’t get noted is because clinical depression in kids manifests itself very differently than in adults — adults pull in, but adolescents and kids tend to act out with anger and rage. People don’t see it as depression but as a kid who’s delinquent or a brat,” she says.

The kids hanging out at AMC theaters this summer don’t look like brats. In their Abercrombie T-shirts and underwear-showing shorts, they look skinny, pure and beautiful. The ones who can’t get into the grown-up movies are stuck with the likes of Tomb Raider. AMC may think the ANSWER Network’s ad is too controversial, but Kansas City’s homegrown theater chain loves that crotch shot, the one with two automatic pistols strapped onto Angelina Jolie’s luscious thighs. Who cares if the two-fisted way she fires those weapons looks eerily like what Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold did in the Columbine library? Besides, this is a PG-13 movie, so the bad guys just disappear when she blows them away. There’s no blood. People don’t splatter like in real life.

Which must be sorta the way a five-year-old imagines death.