Surge of Student Suicides Pushes Las Vegas Schools to Reopen

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From The New York Times: “Since schools shut their doors in March, an early-warning system that monitors students’ mental health episodes has sent more than 3,100 alerts to district officials, raising alarms about suicidal thoughts, possible self-harm or cries for care. By December, 18 students had taken their own lives.

The spate of student suicides in and around Las Vegas has pushed the Clark County district, the nation’s fifth largest, toward bringing students back as quickly as possible. This month, the school board gave the green light to phase in the return of some elementary school grades and groups of struggling students even as greater Las Vegas continues to post huge numbers of coronavirus cases and deaths.”

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12 COMMENTS

    • Yes, you certainly did.

      Though I will say on my own behalf that being IN school was what was making me feel suicidal. “Distance education” would have been an amazing gift for me.

      Which goes to show that trying to do the same thing for every child is dumb.

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      • I was pointing out long ago a huge number of student, very violent, suicides in the Barrington, IL school district, too. When I lived in that area, Barrington High School had the highest suicide rate of any school in the country.

        But let’s all be realistic, the psych drugs can cause such issues, even according to the black box labels now on those drugs. But, unfortunately they put the “mental health” workers – who claim to know nothing about the common adverse effects of the psych drugs – in charge of covering up those suicides.

        We need to fix the schools, not neurotoxic poison the children.

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      • I guess it’s comparatively easy to ditch the whole thing, or have a bot do your schoolwork (do they have them yet?) — but compulsory screen-staring is bad for you in lots of ways. Maybe the upshot is that people will be sick of their computers by the time this is over and we’re able to see each other’s faces again.

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        • My point has nothing to do with the “learning” aspect of school. I always knew from the start that school was not about “learning,” it was about COMPLIANCE and HIERARCHY. Knowing your place. Dumping the shit downhill on the person on the next lower step. Not challenging the basic assumptions. Trusting the “authorities” to have the answers and subduing any independent sense of reality.

          The advantages of online school for me would have been

          1) No need to be with rude and obnoxious and bullying teachers all day. Having a mute button or the ability to walk away from the screen if they were abusive. Not having to stay in at recess because I talked to someone at the end of lunch. Not having my teacher be able to throw a book across the room and hit me on the head when I objected.

          2) No need to be with obnoxious and bullying peers all day. No recess sitting wondering if anyone would want to play with me. No having to stand by and watch when other kids were being abused.

          3) No need to get up at the wee hours and take the bus. ‘Nuff said there.

          4) Ability to proceed at my own pace on things without having to wait for the class to catch up.

          5) Plus, I could have gone to the bathroom without getting their freakin’ approval!

          Naturally, it is quite possible to make distance learning just as obnoxiously authoritarian as in-classroom school. But it would have made me feel a lot less anxious just to know I could be where I was and not be subject to the whims of the teacher and can turn my camera off at my discretion, even if they got mad at me. I’d have given a lot for those privileges.

          Steve

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  1. Well if the news articles constantly tell kids that what they experience is an illness that is not curable and resides inside them as a permanent affliction, then what exactly do you think the outcome is? Put them on drugs that cause them to feel just horrible which proves to them that they must be really sick, what do you expect the outcome to be? The media is complicit in furthering the suicides. The ads on TV paid for by pharma and government blessed, everyone has a hand in the outcomes of shitty quality of life or suicides. But we have no power at all to stop this and young lives are gone, with psychiatry not helping anyone to expose the lies, because after all, they are part of the false narratives

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  2. Yeah, I think we’re getting off the subject of lockdowns causing this surge, though no doubt there are drugs as part of the mix — but they always are. What’s happening in your everyday life is also important and social isolation is making a lot of people extra crazy.

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