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FOR MTV. THE VIDEO BULletin board of Generation X, Kurt Cobain's suicide was a natural story. After years of rerunning the dead men of another generation Hendrix, Lennon, Morrison -MTV had its own contemporary tragedy. And on came the Cobain videos, his inter-views, his concert outtakes. Meanwhile, off camera, MTV staffers took disturbing reports from radio stations that kids were calling up, distraught, worried, maybe suicidal. So, before signing off his Cobain special, MTV host Kurt Loder spoke quietly into the camera with a message to live by: "Don't do it."
Hardly any, in fact, will. The shock and sadness felt by Cobain's fans were not likely to lead to much imitation. As the Who said long ago, the kids are all right; it's one thing to walk around in torn jeans like a rock star, and another to put a bullet in your brain. That's not to minimize what the mentalhealth folk call generalized anxiety. "I heard it driving in a cab," said Johanna Pirko, 18, a freshman at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. "I just have this feeling that our generation is dying anyway. There's Kurt and River Phoenix, The aimless quality of my age. The job situation. I think a lot of people think they're not understood, that their parents don't understand them, that society has no place for them because of their age."
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That may help explain why suicide already ranks as the third leading killer of 15- to 24-year-olds. While the rates have leveled out, they're still up an astonishing 200 percent over the past four decades. What makes teens especially vulnerable is the tendencyby the healthy and the troubled alike -to view life as an all-or-nothing proposition. Unlike adults, they haven't the ability or experience to see that every defeat isn't permanent. The young also tend to view suicide itself as impermanent, glamorizing how pain-free their existence might be afterward. "They don't get it," says New York children's nursing specialist Holly Shaw. "To them suicide is a continued form of life." Mix that kind of susceptibility with the self-destruction of a cultural idol and some fragile young psyches could topple over the edge.
Most experts, however, don't expect to see large numbers of copycat teen suicides in the wake of Cobain's. "The closer you are to the person who committed suicide. the more likely you are to emulate it," says University of Chicago psychiatrist Bennett Leventhal. "The vast majority of kids are not that close to Cobain." The ones most apt to copy the rock star are those who already have significant emotional problems. Says clinical psychologist Fred Yapelli: "Kids who have low self-esteem and self-identity tend to get hooked on these heroes," merging emotionally with them to the point of taking on their personalities. "When somebody like Cobain kills himself," he continues, "those kids are more likely to fall into the same self-destructive behavior."
The element of timing may be decisive. While the vast majority of teenagers who kill themselves have suffered psychological disorders, some move in and out of high risk for short periods (even just 24 hours) because of emotional trauma. Los Angeles psychologist Michael Peck cites the 15-year-old who's thrown when his girlfriend ditches him and overwhelmed when his mother chastises him for a poor grade. "If there happens to be a gun there," says Peck, "it's over." Indeed, the presence of firearms may be the most pivotal factor. A study comparing adolescent suicide victims who had no apparent mental disorders with kids who didn't commit suicide found only one difference: a loaded gun in the house. So much for the idea that guns don't kill people.
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