Carson Hoyt died by suicide on June 13, 2021, at age 15.
His parents asked that their late son be mentioned in Hampton High School’s yearbook for the class of 2024 – what would have been Carson’s graduation year.
School officials punted the question to the Anglophone South School District in southern New Brunswick, which refused the request. Director Allan Davis told the Hoyts that memorializing a student who died by suicide was inappropriate because “the focus of graduation activities is to celebrate the achievements of the graduates.”
It’s hard to imagine a more dismissively crass response to grieving parents. Memorials to students who have died – in car crashes or shootings, or from illnesses like cancer and otherwise – are commonplace. Losing a classmate hurts.
So, the school district changed tack, saying including Carson in the yearbook would pose a risk to other vulnerable students, citing the theory of “suicide contagion.”
What a crock. Can anyone seriously argue that seeing a mention of a student who died by suicide in a yearbook is going to push others to kill themselves?
Suicide contagion is a real phenomenon, but also a complex and controversial one.
The main concern, or fear, is that the glorification of suicide could lead to copycats, especially in emotionally charged groups such as teenagers.
But there is a world of difference between memorializing someone and glorifying their means of death.
Carson Hoyt’s parents never asked that his suicide be mentioned. In fact, they specifically said they did not want him to be a poster boy.
All they want is for him to be remembered as a missing member of the class of 2024: an empathetic gesture that should not be controversial.
But the school district’s response is typical of how we continue, as a society, to struggle with issues that make us uncomfortable, such as suicide.
For far too long, our response has been denial – to simply turn away.
Reporting on suicide was, until recently, largely taboo, with mentions of self-inflicted deaths reduced to euphemistic whisperings like “died suddenly.” In recent years, however, media reporting of suicide has changed dramatically. It has become far more nuanced and sophisticated.
One of the catalysts for change has been the Mindset Guide. First published in 2014, it is a set of guidelines for writing about mental health produced by journalists, for journalists. (Full disclosure: I am one of the contributors.)
The Mindset Guide, in short, says we should not be perpetuating stigma, and that we should report on mental illness the way we should report on everything else, “with curiosity, compassion and a dose of righteous indignation when people are mistreated or wronged.”
At the same time, journalists should endeavour to not cause harm – for example, by unnecessarily reporting gruesome details such as the method of suicide, or by retraumatizing grieving families.
In 2022, the most recent year for which statistics are available, 3,593 people died by suicide in Canada. It is one of the top 10 leading causes of death across the country overall, and the second leading cause of death (after traumatic injuries, mostly in motor vehicle crashes) in the 15-to-34 age group.
We should not be silent about mental illness and suicide. Teens certainly aren’t silent about it; those issues are part of their everyday conversations.
It is believed that adolescents are particularly vulnerable to suicide contagion, but again, cause and effect is difficult to pin down.
There is no question that there are suicide clusters, especially in close-knit spaces such as schools and small Indigenous communities. But the response to this should be an open, sensitive discussion, not an effort to sweep it under the carpet.
In trying to justify its decision to not allow Carson Hoyt to be included in his high school yearbook, the school district cited a decade-old document produced by the U.S. National Association of School Psychologists entitled, “Memorials: Special Considerations When Memorializing an Incident.”
Among other things, the document says there should be no memorials, plaques or pages in yearbooks dedicated to students who died by suicide. It even says students shouldn’t be encouraged to attend the funerals of classmates.
These recommendations hark back to a day when discussions of suicide were seen as shameful and taboo. And there is no evidence to back up the document’s claims.
There is no right or wrong way to grieve, nor to memorialize someone who died by suicide.
Decisions like including a dead student in a yearbook should rest with the family and students at the school, not with patronizing, father-knows-best bureaucrats.