40.0°

When Nani Toetuu's good friend died by suicide last year, the 16-year-old Juneau-Douglas High School student was shocked.

"It comes out of nowhere," Toetuu said. "It was just hard to take it."

Though four teenagers have killed themselves in Juneau since the school year began, students say most adults don't talk about suicide. They said a death is discussed like a news item, then dropped.

"People gossip about it," said 10th-grader Marie Speegle, who takes two classes at JDHS but is otherwise home-schooled. She said kids talk about why they might have done it and whether they knew the student, but the discussion creates tensions.

"I've heard kids get yelled at because they're talking about it," she said.

Other students will say, "You don't know" anything about the person, or "You don't understand," Speegle said. "It's not a good environment."

Others appreciated counseling sessions organized by the Juneau School District in response to the death of a student.

"The principal allowed students to come in and talk to counselors for a day and to meet up with friends and reminisce about (the student)," Toetuu said. "A counselor confronted me and we had a long talk. She explained stuff and it came clear to me that ... life goes on. It helped."

Students were confused by what can cause depression, blaming problems they might face on a variety of things from "there's nothing to do" in Juneau to its rainy weather.

Other students said they felt trapped here but at the same time were stressed just thinking about getting out. For many of them, "getting out" means college, and several students said pressure from parents to be successful seemed unbearable at times.

It isn't just Juneau's geographical isolation that makes students feel trapped, but the small size of the community, some said. Everyone knows everyone else's business, which makes teens try to hide things more.

They also said some parents are out of touch.

"A lot of teenagers, the majority of them ... seem happy," said JDHS student Samantha Keen. "But you have to pay really good attention to them. You have a student, for example, they don't drink, they don't smoke ... they listen to their parents. Yet they still cut themselves."

Keen and other students said parents either put too much pressure on kids or don't pay enough attention. She summed it up by saying parent expectations are misplaced.

"I don't think they pay attention to things, except for grades or how your boyfriend dresses, whatever," she said. "So you go home and they ask, 'How was your day?' and we just say, 'Fine.' We just say that to cover it up."

Teens feeling that their parents are out of touch is nothing new, but according to JDHS health teacher Nancy Seamount, life for young people has "really, really changed."

Life is faster-paced than ever before and hectic lifestyles give teenagers less of a chance to process feelings of grief or guilt they may feel if their friend died by suicide, Seamount said.

"Adults are so busy and our lives are so hyper-stimulated by technology ... so hectic and cluttered to meet certain standards that we don't spend the time," she said. "And that's what we miss. Kids want the dialogue of feelings."