BY DAVE PRICE
Daily Post Editor
What do the occasional deaths on the Caltrain tracks have to do with one of William Shakespeare’s most venerated plays?
Caltrain is refusing to report to the public when people are killed by trains on their tracks. They’ve imposed a news blackout on the deaths. They don’t want any mention of suicides in the news out of fear it will result in copycats.
They say that whenever a suicide is mentioned in print, the risk of another person taking their life increases, especially among teenagers.
But clutch your pearls dear readers. Just about every mid-Peninsula high school requires students to read Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” The two main characters in that play are both teenagers who kill themselves.
Where are the anti-suicide safety netters? Why aren’t they demanding our schools remove “Romeo and Juliet” from their classrooms and libraries?
Better yet, why not round up all the copies of “Romeo and Juliet” and burn them in the driveway near Palo Alto High School’s campanile tower? Yes, an old fashioned book burning. That’s something Palo Altans can get behind.
I guess the community is OK with newspaper censorship too.
Caltrain’s news blackout isn’t based on concern for human life. It’s about changing the subject of a political conversation. Caltrain doesn’t want to pay for bridges to separate streets from the tracks, called grade separations. Yet every time a youth is killed by a Caltrain, people ask why hasn’t the rail agency found any money for rail separations. Remember, this was an agency that was able to find $2.44 billion to switch from diesel to mostly electric locomotives.
If they had different priorities, the death toll would be lower. But if you keep the deaths out of the news, you change the conversation. Which is precisely the goal.
Now is a good time to drop the news blackout. The blackout happened because San Mateo County had a corrupt sheriff, Christina Corpus. She refused to talk to reporters in an attempt to make issues go away. She’s been fired and replaced with a law enforcement official, former Santa Clara County Undersheriff Ken Binder, who has a reputation for being a straight shooter.
When people are killed in a car accident or an industrial mishap, the sheriff or police tell the public what happened and answer questions. They’re required to do so. Corpus was completely onboard with the blackout, bending to the politics of the Caltrain board. Plus, Caltrain was paying her to handle law enforcement at train stations, which is a conflict of interest.
Let’s hope Binder will break away from Caltrain’s blackout and deliver information on what his officers discover in a professional way.
To quote from another work of Shakespeare, “All’s Well that Ends Well,” the character Mariana says: “No legacy is so rich as honesty.”
Editor Dave Price’s column appears on Mondays.
Thanks for the rage-bait. My high school theater did Romeo & Juliet and several other great classics every year and nobody killed themselves. Burning books is a great way to loose readers and I won’t be back on PA daly. Had enough.
I have lived in Palo Alto for 46 years. Even decades ago, it was known among many in the community that a subset of teenage suicides were children facing what they saw as a cruel world, because they were gay. When my sons entered high school they reinforced the truth of this sad dynamic; at the breakfast table, they would say, “Well, he was gay and his parents weren’t happy.” The PTA grapevine also confirmed when a recent teen suicide was gay child. A suicide of a traveling nurse at Stanford a yearish ago was also a case of a young man who was ill received when he came out to his conservative parents; he jumped off the Dumbarton. So it behooves us as a community to offer support to all teens. We need to let the LGBT teens know that it will indeed get better. Caltrans can withhold the details of suicides; they can build safety nets; we could ban Shakespeare! The better course as a community is to tell parents to withhold all critical comments about the LGBT world. Their children are listening; they are carefully listening.
I guess some of the commenters don’t realize that this editorial is satire … parody.
The copycat theory, called the Werther Effect, is based on debunked research from the 1970s by sociologist David Phillips. Other sociologists (Christopher Ferguson, James Hittner) tried to replicate Phillips’ research but were unsuccessful. It’s a shame Caltrain based its news blackout on junk science.
You can’t do satire in Palo Alto because the residents are too dumb to get it.
Having lost a child to suicide, this editorial hurt my heart. Regardless of the satiric intent of this article, it isn’t a topic where satire is a meaningful way to make a point. I perhaps agree that information should be transparent. But given the tone of some of the comments and sharing what could be considered highly personal (and perhaps even incorrect) information about the recent deaths by suicide, I am not sure this community can have a blame-free conversation and move the city forward. I am a loud voice for more efforts for mental health across the boards. I would just ask that it be done with more sensitivity. Also please be sure to always recommend resources for anyone in crisis. And for the community, the preferred language is “died by suicide” versus any other phrase. Just like someone who died from cancer or a heart attack. – From a caring community mental health organizer
This is a good editorial for a city that always buries its head in the sand whenever there is a suicide. Many Palo Altans want to use political correctness (euphemisms instead of descriptive, widely understood words) in the hopes of making it all go away. They should be part of the solution and not the people who go “tut tut” every time a person expresses their feelings.
Project Safety Net was an utter failure, resulting in many lives lost. Their approach of keeping the community in the dark reinforced the stigma around seeking mental health treatment. I’m sure some of them mean well but the failure of that program was catastrophic.
It would be useful to know what prescription drugs these kids were on before they took their lives. In the early 2000s, Paly had a number of train suicides linked to the prescription drug Accutane. Public awareness about the side effects of Accutane caused Hoffmann-La Roche to pull the drug off the market in 2009. That wouldn’t happen today because of people in the community who want to keep everything associated with these deaths a secret. Transparency saves lives.
[Comment removed — Terms of Use violation. Please don’t post links.]
The removed link was to a scientific article that Accutane does NOT increase the risk of suicide.
Maybe the train isn’t the issue. I just read in Monday’s paper that the suicide rate was very high among youth going through a “transition”. Let’s focus on what’s happening in the home and in the therapist’s office.
Mare Lucas doesn’t understand that trying to hide these deaths increases the stigma around getting counseling. As somebody else said on this thread, Transparency Saves Lives.