Coronavirus despair: How can we reach out to teens to clear the clouds of depression?
Two high-school age kids from Natomas have died and their cases are officially being investigated as suicides, causing officials to react with the deep sadness we all feel for the loss of life and the despair that led to it. They’re also worried about something else.
They’re worried about students isolated, removed from each other in school, alone. They’re worried about collateral damage to a pandemic.
They don’t know the why, but they didn’t have to take a great leap to land on this troubling thought: Could these teens one day be viewed as the first young people in Sacramento County to be victims of COVID-19, even if indirectly?
Leaders can’t help but to worry that these kids – one boy and one girl – were pushed over the edge of despair by having their lives upended with the rest of us when we were all ordered to shelter in place so we could stop the spread of the coronavirus.
“When kids go to school they are treated the same,” said Sacramento City Councilwoman Angelique Ashby, whose district covers much of Natomas. “They have access to food, their friends.”
“But the home is not an equal place for kids,” she said. “Some have tragic back stories.”
Chris Evans, superintendent of the Natomas Unified School District, said: “Some kids don’t want to be home. They would rather be with their friends and their teachers.”
Teens at a loss
The two kids – one from Natomas Unified and one from Twin Rivers Unified School District – died in what are apparently unrelated suicides. Because they were minors, there is a great deal of information about them that is protected by privacy laws.
But the sense of foreboding that adults felt learning of their deaths is real and can’t be overlooked as the forced isolation of the COVID-19 plague drags on and calls to suicide hotlines grow.
We can’t just pat ourselves on the back because our COVID-19 illness and death curves aren’t as pronounced as New York’s. We can’t just create orders that strip kids of schools, after-school programs, parks, compassionate adults and friends who might have picked up a phone and made a call that might have saved these two kids.
“You close playgrounds, you stop sports programs, you cancel proms and for kids, it seems like the walls are crumbling around them,” Ashby said.
“Being a teenager is hard in an ideal situation,” she said. “Our kids have been out of school for a month now and for a teenager, a month is a long time.”
Evans said he has personally struggled with the isolation of COVID-19.
“I’m not built for this and I’m an almost 50-year-old person who has experienced a lot in his life,” he said.
I’m a 57-year-old person blessed with health and stability in my immediate family and I have despaired during these weeks. I have longed for Catholic Mass, for the Eucharist, for handshakes with my brothers and sisters in the pews. I miss my friends, my extended family. I miss Kings games and baseball on TV and dinner at all the wonderful restaurants and pubs that make Sacramento a wonderful place to live.
I haven’t seen my colleagues in a month and I want to hug them all.
Do you know what I mean? And if you do, can you imagine those feelings in a fragile teenager without the coping skills that you and I have earned over years of living?
Can you imagine being sent home when you have reason to fear home?
We don’t have to imagine it.
The distance between us
This is happening with our public schools right now. We don’t need to know every detail related to the deaths of these kids to know that some of our kids will hurt themselves if they are lonely enough and sad enough and desperate enough.
From now on, every time Sacramento County or California craft another order to restrict our freedoms, those orders have to come with consideration for what isolation is doing to the most fragile among us. Ordering people into isolation is easy. Doing something for those victims of isolation is real leadership.
Gov. Gavin Newsom at his Tuesday news conference addressed the stress and anxiety of isolation, and devoted a portion of his daily update to the message that “staying at home doesn’t mean you are alone.” He noted the hotlines available for help which can be found at covid19.ca.gov.
Kids need to be in contact with adults they trust. They need to be reconnected with familiar faces in their isolation. There are some school districts, Sacramento City Unified and Los Angeles Unified among them, where distance learning programs have been bogged down by labor strife.
“We have to reach out to these kids,” Ashby said.
“We have to give them something to do other than brooding and dwelling on the negative.”
Ashby said it starts with how we talk around kids. She said she doesn’t allow anyone in her office to call this time “the new normal.”
“This is not the new normal,” she said. “When this is over were going to have big parties. We’re going to have movie nights. We’re going to have delayed weddings and graduations. We’re going to be together again.”
We will be, but for now, we can’t assume that all lives are equal in isolation. We can’t believe the fallacy that COVID-19 is the great equalizer.
It’s not: COVID-19 is the great victimizer of the most fragile among us.
