Strange Contagion

by Lee Daniel Kravetz

  Thinking about the work of French anthropologist Gustave Le Bon, I’m reminded that thoughts are not the only type of social contagion that exists. Influence runs deeper than ideas alone, and I find myself wondering how infectious behaviors, like those accompanying parenting trends or an exceedingly strong work ethic, might be behind the mystery of these two young students.

  Le Bon proposes that the wisdom or dysfunction of those around us supersedes that of the individual. A person “immersed for some length of time in a crowd soon finds himself . . . in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotized individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer,” he writes. Standing close to others exposes us to all manner of behaviors, like impulsiveness, irritability, a lack of capacity to reason, the absence of judgment, and the exaggeration of sentiments that unyoke us from our own and more conventional social norms.

  Given this, it isn’t difficult to apply the psychology of contagious behavior to what’s happening in Palo Alto. It’s feasible, I suppose, that we’re witnessing the result of hive mentality, a malady of toxic crowd-think and dangerous conduct. Kids wind up adopting the prevailing standards of those around them, an impetuous, unwelcome, and indiscriminating imitation, a mirroring of blind impulse. The more people there are who mirror a behavior within a particularly insular and dense community, the more these prominent features catch. The initiator’s gender and age relative to the population matters. So does the personality of the observer, a ratio of extroversion to introversion, and one’s natural response to the burden of conformity.

  In addition to staggeringly contagious thoughts and behaviors, I also consider how emotional contagions might play into this situation, like feelings associated with personal expectations that spread and catch among peers. An automatic lockstep synchronization of countenance, body movement, language, and attitudes is responsible for emotion infection rates that hardly stop at just one-to-one spread. Emotions radiate outward like an atomic blast across groups of people, each member receiving and mirroring everything that accounts for the full spectrum of the human emotional experience.

  Each one of these influences rings true, yet none of them perfectly matches the phenomenon at Gunn High. I—and the rest of Palo Alto—want to be able to point to one specific cause, but the more I investigate, the clearer it becomes that diagnosis will not be that simple. So, rather than look at each type of social contagion in isolation, I’m now left considering the possibility that we have witnessed the merging of highly communicable traits, catchable phenomena mixing together as a perfect storm, a “strange” contagion comprising many common phenomena silently passing between people.

  Perhaps this is not the result of any one type of social contagion—thought, behavior, or emotion—but a terrifying consequence of all of them together.

  Chapter 3

  A Perfect Tempest

  I meet Roni Habib at a class for new fathers. Relying on a safety-in-numbers approach, we gravitate toward one another, becoming fast compatriots united in a struggle to learn how to swaddle, soothe, and diaper. Hearing his personal story over time, I come to find that hope is never far removed from his boyish face and his warm eyes. Habib carries himself with contentment and amiability, as well as a manner of brashness that instills confidence in his students at Gunn High. This is especially true whenever circumstances oblige him to relay troublesome news, as they do once again and for a third time in fewer than three months.

  At the start of the new academic year, an incoming freshman named Catrina Holmes becomes another teenage fatality on the train tracks close to the school.

  The following Sunday morning as we pack up after our parenting class, Habib divulges, “I don’t know what to tell my econ students.” Is he supposed to facilitate conversation about it, discourage rumination over it, or encourage his classes to put their heads down and carry on like nothing’s wrong? “Between you and me, I can’t stop thinking about it.”

  Like Habib, since Holmes’s death I’ve found myself caught in a kind of mental loop, too. As a new parent, it is far too easy to place myself in the shoes of grieving fathers. I imagine walking past an empty bedroom, and the unfathomable heartache residing within that emptiness. Whenever the local news radio station reports on Holmes’s passing, I turn up the volume in my car in anticipation that someone has come forward with new information to share that will stop what seems to have become a deadly cycle. The experts repeat their refrain. The town, they say, is experiencing a suicide cluster—that place, time, and mental illness connect all three cases.

  Alongside horror, these incidents admittedly stoke in me a kind of inquisitiveness, too. I’m familiar with Palo Alto’s reputation for intellectualism, its wealth, and the promise it offers its children. All of these things make a cluster in this town seem all the more implausible. These kids have such bright futures to live for.

  Visiting a Stanford University library while gathering research for another article, I find myself pulling up academic studies on suicide clusters instead. One of the more noteworthy instances I happen across is a case in 1984 in which a young Austrian businessman jumped in front of an oncoming Viennese subway. His behavior set into motion a string of copycat suicides at a rate of roughly five per week for nearly a year.

  I run across the story of a pop singer named Yukiko Okada. Her 1986 suicide led to dozens of copycats in Japan, a phenomenon that became known as Yukiko syndrome. In another I read that, well before any of these scenarios, there was a famous Chinese silent film actress, Ruan Lingyu, who died by suicide in 1935, sparking a collective national grief so profound that three women killed themselves while participating in her funeral procession.

  When the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774, readers shot themselves in line with the actions of its protagonist. Two hundred years later, the sociologist David Phillips suggested that media exposure glamorizing a single suicide not only predicted additional deaths but also that they would take place in the same manner. You ran into the Werther effect, as Phillips called it, when vulnerable people mimicked graphic, detailed coverage surrounding the event. Each story has resulted from a kind of spontaneous mirroring effect within groups of people. The method of transmission looks familiar; it’s the very thing that Elaine Hatfield, Richard Dawkins, and Gustave Le Bon were writing about, if not specifically about how to stop it from occurring.

  Reading on, I’m glad to learn that communities have halted clusters before. To address the subway suicides in Austria, a prevention task force speculated that Vienna’s oversaturated media attention was somehow transmitting deadly thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. Those who had never thought about completing suicide, let alone by jumping in front of subway cars, were unconsciously catching the idea and engaging in heretofore unthinkable actions. The theory went that the strange contagion event in Vienna was propagated by media exposure, and so, to stop it, the city needed to curb its coverage. The plan worked. Once publishers removed any mention of train deaths from the front pages, the rate of copycats dropped by 80 percent.

  The curbing method so triumphantly stopped this mirroring that the US surgeon general and the Annenberg Public Policy Center created nonbinding guidelines on how media were to talk about suicide in a way that would not make it look viable or attractive to susceptible people. I learn from the Stanford archives that researchers from the university’s Division of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry and Child Development are working with regional media to keep stories about the deaths by Gunn High students brief and off of the front pages. They are convincing editors to seek advice from prevention experts rather than pursue quotes from police or first responders. They are also encouraging reporters to refrain from describing fatalities in lurid detail.

  These guidelines seem to be working, too. Every week that goes by without another incident supports the effectiveness of this curative method. The town picks up the pieces of a tragic summer, catches i
ts breath, and makes the motions of carrying on until the motions feel somewhat genuine.

  The rainy season is upon us when a sixteen-year-old named William Dickens becomes the fourth train fatality from Gunn High. I slow my car a couple of blocks away from my apartment and turn off the radio after the report finishes airing.

  This isn’t like Vienna.

  The standard media cure method isn’t working in Palo Alto. By tempering their coverage, Austria’s media stopped the localized suicide cluster; despite adhering to the same media standards at home, children from Gunn High are still taking their lives. The strange contagion in Palo Alto proves itself utterly unique and scary as hell. Where I initially found examples in the archives that comforted me—communities that experienced and stopped suicide clusters—that logic doesn’t seem to hold true here and I don’t understand why.

  So I return to the science, hunting for deeper insight. I pull studies by social psychologists like Peter Totterdell, Albert Bandura, Peter Salovey, and John D. Mayer. Their work begins to create for me an unusual picture: Palo Alto is unique. The search for a cause is developing into a hunt for the specific conditions amalgamating in a particular time and place, a fusion of environment, temperature, mutation, and host. Maybe it’s the town’s particular brand of stress or, as some suggest, its teaching philosophies, its rumored “Tiger mom” culture emphasizing high levels of academic achievement, or the result of dozens or more qualities unique to this place and coming together within the rage of a perfect tempest.

  In the eye of this storm exists Gunn High, an otherwise self-contained system relatively spared from crime and violence. The most affluent families in the country populate the neighborhoods within the school district’s boundaries. Parents of Gunn High students work at nearby Hewlett Packard, NASA’s Ames Research Center, Facebook, Tesla Motors, Google, and Stanford University. More than a third of these households have a family member who has earned a higher degree. In this striking setting, none of the usual explanations or preventative measures for this horror apply. For instance, the greatest frequency of teenage suicide in the world is a consequence of living in troubled inner cities and some of the poorest places, while Palo Alto remains among the wealthiest. Obviously, responsible media coverage hasn’t stopped the cluster. Neither has the school’s implementation of preventative safety measures, like supplemental on-site therapists. Nothing about this population points to the unlikely formation of a suicide cluster within it, and yet the death toll continues to climb.

  I want to know why.

  At Gunn High, Roni Habib has also been hunting for answers. He searches for the reasons that are leading young people from his school to take their lives. One day after our last parenting class, he and I stop for breakfast together. For a while, we sit at a small table on the patio at Printers Cafe in the late morning sunlight. Just beyond the roundabout a block up the street, a Caltrain whooshes past with a couple of blasts of its horn. Everyone in Silicon Valley recognizes that high-pitched, pained, and elongated detonation of sound.

  Many of the students who died over the summer and fall have passed through Habib’s economics class at one time or another. I ask him how the rest of the students are faring at the high school. Hard to tell, he says. Obviously they’re scared and sad, but they’re also guarded. Maybe too guarded. Stoic, even.

  His stare grows distant as he says this, and his voice softens a little. Each death finds him questioning whether he might have been able to do anything more to identify trouble or stop it from transpiring. He knows this school system, knows these kids, knows the breed of students Gunn High cultivates—both from the perspective of a teacher and as a onetime student. Before becoming an educator, back when he was an underclassman at Gunn High, he and his friends talked about modeling the path of Silicon Valley tech legends. They were going to become engineers, make their fortunes, and retire young. Unfortunately, Habib was a terrible engineer, couldn’t figure out coding, hated the math, and was unfulfilled by the undertakings of life in front of a computer monitor. While his friends went on to work for start-ups and launch tech companies, he fell into teaching. Education suited him much better than tech anyway. It doesn’t hurt that his height, a looming six-foot-three, and the gravity of his voice, tinged with its Israeli lilt, provides him with effortless classroom authority. At thirty, he easily negotiates the river between students and teachers. More than most people, he feels he’s in a position to notice a young person’s distress, yet he’s registered none of the signs.

  He remembers his students fondly to me. Jean-Paul Blanchard was popular, smart, and well loved. He had a pretty girlfriend. “He was the last person anyone suspected of harboring suicidal thoughts,” he says, weary and uncertain. Sonya Raymakers was the theater department’s head designer and sort of a mother hen to the drama kids. She even babysat some of the faculty’s own children. Catrina Holmes hadn’t matriculated into Gunn High yet, so Habib hadn’t had her in his class. William Dickens he describes as a sweet boy, athletic, a star on the swim team.

  “It’s gotten bad,” he sighs. “People are scared for their kids. Naturally, everyone’s pointing fingers.” The resonance and pitch of disparate accusations against the school administration is beginning to overshadow Gunn High’s sterling academic character, its placement among the top 1 percent of public high schools in the country. Personally, he doesn’t think the school or overarching academic protocols are behind the cluster. As for what’s actually behind it, underneath it, operating inside it, he honestly doesn’t know. And despite all of the expert research and statistics pointing to possible or even likely explanations, he suspects the truth is that in this case nobody knows.

  But he’s building a theory.

  Chapter 4

  A Particular Predilection for Catching

  Habib ends breakfast with an invitation to visit him at Gunn High. I take him up on his offer in late January 2010. We are sitting now in Habib’s simple office in Gunn High’s administration building. It’s lacking in legroom and walking space, and the air smells like old carpet. I wonder if he worries, as I do, for his own newborn son. “I know this sounds like science fiction,” I start, “but do you think our kids can catch whatever’s going around?”

  And it does sound strange, the supposition coming out of my mouth, as though factors beyond our control could really have so much sway in dictating how we act, think, and feel. Still, all we have are facts and the conclusions we try to draw from them.

  The facts now include another name. A week earlier, county authorities recovered the body of a nineteen-year-old recent Gunn High graduate named Brian Bennion Taylor on the train tracks, 150 yards north of the crossing where four other students have already taken their lives since last May. He had been a varsity wrestler and tennis player and the recipient of a presidential service award. He was also nominated to be the senior homecoming prince.

  If five well-off and seemingly adjusted all-American kids walked in front of trains, then what says our all-American kids aren’t going to be subject to whatever forces shaped that decision? Then again, just because a few people died by suicide doesn’t mean that every child is subject to the stimuli that promote such extremes. Logically, it’s unlikely our children, many years from now, will mimic this behavior. Yet, when it comes to suicide, rationality plays no part.

  “I don’t think so,” Habib says, hesitantly. “I hope not, anyway.”

  He has spread his lunch out on a brown paper bag before him on a vintage teacher’s desk that makes this room feel more dated than any other part of the school I’ve seen so far.

  “Then again,” he muses, biting into his cheese sandwich, “Silicon Valley’s particularly adept at making things catch.”

  Habib’s theory intrigues me. Making things catch takes artistry. It involves a balance of substance, precise timing, a favorable environment, and a bit of theater. To Habib’s point, Silicon Valley exists to scale great products. Its track record remains unmatched. The Audion vacuum tube,
audio oscillators, personal satellites, premium electric vehicles, social media and smartphones, the popularizing of thirty-dollar hoodies and work attire of denim and T-shirt cotton—all of these things have caught. Traits that define the way Silicon Valley works, that make innovation more possible—thinking big, creating transparency, developing the peer-to-peer sharing economy of Uber and Airbnb—these things, too, have caught.

  Silicon Valley is also responsible for producing the deaths of five young people in six months. As for reasons why—why here and why now—there are seemingly no points to hear that people haven’t already made dozens of times. They say that the suicide cluster is the result of symptoms of this unique culture of wealth in a community built of innovation-driven economics. Or a malady of an obscenely ambitious work ethic. Or the bug inherent in new technology that allows media to stoke the spread of bad ideas. Some say it’s the toxicity of a frenzy effect. The pestilence of irrational hysteria. The infection of bad attitudes. A side effect of the kind of leaders we model. Others put forward it’s the fever of parental expectation and personal determination. The petri dish of American acculturation taken to its extreme. A plague of extreme anxiety and depression the likes of which few have seen before.

  Of course each of these thoughts, behaviors, and emotions is a contagious phenomenon, and there’s no reason to believe that some if not all of them are culprits in creating this strange contagion event. If Silicon Valley is better than other places at making things catch, maybe, says Habib, the same mechanisms are behind the cluster. As to what those mechanisms are, we talk about an element of unconscious attunement at play here that has always served the region well. This very insight allows Silicon Valley companies to innovate, read market demand, and oftentimes exceed it better than almost anyone else.