IMHO#1

The recent news that caught my attention is a suicide issue on Caltrain tracks. Reviewing the past articles about this issue, I found out that suicide by train is not a new phenomenon in California as well as where I’m from, Japan. However, it must be a rare case that the four teens from the same high school committed suicide within a half year using same method. Sadly, throwing one’s body into a running train is indeed getting be a disturbing trend among teens. According to the article, Caltrain has spent more than $17 million for pedestrian gates, fencing and signs to improve safety at their street crossings and help keep people off the tracks. However, no matter hard they work on physical prevention, it won’t solve the root of this problem.

Caltrain officials said today that the best way to discourage teen suicides on Caltrain tracks is to address mental health issues on a community level and tone down news coverage of the deaths of several young people at a Palo Alto crossing since May. 
I totally agree with this approach, but I also think that giving them an ethical education in terms of suicide is also important to teach kids how important their lives is or how committing suicide can affect others. Some kids might think that committing suicide is only a matter of them, but it is absolutely not true. They should also be able to consider how this experience could affect to the rest of the people such as operators, passengers, local residents, teachers, their classmates and their family member. Especially, it must be very upsetting for the engineer and the conductor as well as the passengers that are on the trains. Although they have no responsibility, technically they were part of the objects that killed kids.The article says that the engineer and the conductor can get counseling and even talk to peer counselors, people who have been through the same kind of situation, who can talk with them about what it feels like.

It is indeed a community’s responsibility to take care of their kids and educate them to prevent these disasters. Adolescent mental health is already a sensitive topic and mental illness makes it more complicated. I really hope the prevention plans that the city made will work out well and won’t see a new case regarding to suicide on Caltrain again.