The Gift

From the looks of it outside, Palo Alto is just another wealthy suburb in the heart of Silicon Valley: sun-dappled tree-lined streets, rows of strip malls with artisan coffee shops and high-end Mediterranean restaurants catering to tech bros and venture investors, fit people exercising on the sidewalks, students everywhere. One's overall impression is of a city of great health and vitality and energy. People seemed at ease. I lived in Palo Alto for 5 years as a grad student at Stanford. It was my home. I remember biking to Blockbuster on Friday nights to pick up something to watch with friends. (It was VHS in those days.) Those were quainter times. What I didn't realize then was that things weren't as sunny as they appeared.

The period between 2009 and 2010 was one of the darkest chapters in Palo Alto history. Over the course of nine months between 2009 and 2010, six Palo Alto teenagers took their own lives. I still get chills every time I hear the whistle of the Caltrain running through the suburbs and remember the horrific deaths of these students. There were so many suicide attempts that volunteers and parents began monitoring the tracks to prevent further loss of life. Two high schools in particular - Gunn High School and Palo Alto High School - were hit hardest by the spate of suicides, and the problem persisted in the years that followed. In 2015, the suicide rate at Gunn and Palo Alto High School was more than four times the national average. Santa Clara County (where Palo Alto is located) saw its annual suicide rate reach 20 children and young adults between 2010 and 2014.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the teen suicide crisis in Palo Alto is that many of the young people who killed themselves were not social outcasts and did not present the usual markers of mental illness. They were normal-seeming kids. Something else was going on. One potential explanation is in the culture of Silicon Valley. Many of the Valley's high schools, like Gunn and Palo Alto High, have very ambitious students from wealthy and highly-educated families. High school students in the area have reported feeling the need to constantly keep up with their peers. They have noted that they feel a tremendous amount of pressure to excel in their academic and extracurricular pursuits and that the competitive atmosphere in their schools has reached unhealthy levels. It's no surprise that anxiety and depression rates among young people have skyrocketed. The problem isn't limited to Silicon Valley. According to a 2019 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, roughly 1 in 6 teens reported making a suicide plan in the previous year, a 44% increase since 2009.

It would be almost irresponsible to talk about the teen mental health crisis and not consider the now well-documented harmful effects of social media on the teenage brain. Social media platforms, many of which were created just a few miles down the road from Gunn and Palo Alto High in Silicon Valley, amplify the social pressures that teenagers are already feeling. Instagram, for example, encourages users to present themselves in idealized ways. The app is specifically engineered to present users with unrealistic depictions of life: people looking perfect, acting perfect, hanging out with their perfect sets of friends, going on perfect vacations and showing off their perfect selfies.

Across the country, excessive use of social media among teenagers has been linked to rising rates of anxiety and depression and higher suicide risk. A ten-year study from researchers at Brigham Young University published in 2021 found that girls who reported using social media for two to three hours a day or more at age 13, and then increased their use over time, were most at risk of suicide in emerging adulthood. The tragic irony is that social media apps, which were designed to give us a way to share and connect with other people, have had the opposite effect for so many of us. They intensify our feelings of exclusion, isolation and invisibility. Social media was supposed to connect the world, but we have never been more disconnected. And our kids are paying the price.

We need to teach young people to develop safer habits online to try to start to shift the culture. It's more important than ever for us as parents to educate our kids about the harmful effects of social media usage. Just as we teach our kids about the risks of drugs and alcohol, we should also teach them about the dangers of social media. We need to do what we can to start attacking the problem that is causing an epidemic of anxiety, depression and suicide among young people. Parenting is critical, but all of us, regardless of whether we have children or not, have a responsibility to model a healthier set of behaviors online.

One way we can do this is by trying to be more vulnerable when we use social media apps. As researcher Brené Brown has noted, for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen, to really be seen, not in small pixelated windows in our best poses, but as our true selves, warts and all. Vulnerability is hard. Too often, we are afraid of what we see in the mirror. We are afraid of who we really are. We are afraid that we aren't good enough. But I want to help us start to rewrite the narrative online. I want to encourage all of you to be more vulnerable. You don't have to stray from the path that leads towards your authentic self. You only cheat yourself when you present a different version of you to the world.

If you feel inadequate online, if you feel down when you are on the apps, if it feels like the world has gotten too overwhelming and too crazy, I'm here for you. I want to offer you a blessing. You are enough. You are way more than enough. Bless you and everything good you have to give. You have so much light within. The world keeps spinning, and waits for your gift.

Stay beautiful,

-Orkut