Behind the acts of violence and rage of both the Virginia Tech and Columbine shootings is a larger issue of mental illness in teens that is rarely addressed. For instance:

• The rate of teenage suicide has tripled over the last 60 years –28 teenagers a week now die by suicide.¹
• Depression and anxiety in adolescents often go unrecognized or untreated for years, and the results can be fatal – over 90 percent of adolescents who die by suicide have a diagnosable mental illness at the time of their death. ²

While school shootings are rare, signs of mental illness in the perpetrators of these crimes are not. School shooters often have a history of suicide attempts, suicidal thoughts or depression³ – which makes identifying those conditions through mental health screening critically important.

Cry for Help takes an intimate look at the efforts of two high schools to identify adolescents at risk. Hamilton High School in Ohio and Clarkstown North High School in New York have both been affected by teen suicide and have launched powerful new programs to prevent future tragedies.

Following the unrelated suicides of four students that shook the Hamilton community, school officials are taking a direct approach with “Character Day” – a raw, emotional, and honest program designed to motivate students to open up and ask for help. In Clarkstown, school officials are taking advantage of the time their students spend on the Internet by creating an online community – one where teens can anonymously air their problems and seek support from their peers and professionals.

Cry for Help also examines the often difficult transition from high school to college through a first-person account of a young woman who has battled mental illness. Stacy Hollingsworth, a straight-A student and gifted musician, was by all appearances a well-adjusted and accomplished young person. When Stacy phoned home from a campus psychiatric hospital during her freshman year at college, it was then that her parents realized things were not as perfect as they seemed. She had been hiding depression, suicidal thoughts, and feelings of paralyzing hopelessness for years. Stacy and her parents chronicle the painstaking journey to put her life back together, and how she founded her college’s first on-campus chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

Additionally, Cry for Help looks at the efforts by some parents to tackle behavior and communication issues during their children’s earliest years – before depression, violence, anger or suicidal impulses take over.

Interviewees include Dr. Chris Lucas, professor of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry at New York University; Dr. Frank Robertz, co-founder of Institute for Violence Prevention and Applied Criminology in Berlin, Germany; and Dr. Nolan Zane, Director of the Asian American Center on Disparities Research.

THIRTEEN’s Cry for Help is funded by the Estate of Marya Sielska; Members of THIRTEEN; the Irene Ritter Foundation; Judy Collins; the Leon Lowenstein Foundation; Donna and Phil Satow; the Marion E. Kenworthy-Sarah H. Swift Foundation.

Cry for Help is a production of THIRTEEN for WNET.ORG. Mary Murphy is producer and Scott Davis is senior producer. Edie Magnus is reporter and executive producer. Neal Shapiro and Stephen Segaller are executives-in-charge.

¹ Campus Mental Service, Recommendations for Change. Vastag et al, 2001.

² Nejm 2006. Study from Velez et al, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 1988.

³ Secret Service Threat Assessment Study for the U.S. Justice Dept.

Stacy Hollingsworth

In many ways, Stacy Hollingsworth was an exceptional teenager – an energetic young woman with talent in academics, sports, music and acting. Always smiling, she appeared – on the outside – to have it all.

But on the inside, Stacy was suffering in ways that no one – not her parents, friends or teachers – ever knew.

“It was the kind of pain where I literally wanted to curl up into a ball and fade away, or scream at the top of my lungs,” she recalls. “It felt like being a prisoner of war – your own war.”

For six years – despite her success in academics, sports and acting – Stacy silently battled depression. At its worst, the illness paralyzed her with feelings of hopelessness, and caused her to spend hours crying in her bedroom.

It began around the age of 14, when Stacy (now 25) remembers losing interest in the activities she once loved, and having trouble getting out of bed in the morning.

“It was like being tortured by your own brain,” she says.

The summer before her freshman year of high school, Stacy says she started to contemplate taking her own life.

“It wasn’t ‘I want to die.’ It was, ‘I can’t take this anymore,’ ” she says. “It was so excruciating to deal with the symptoms of the depression and the pain, there was this feeling that I can’t do this anymore – I don’t know how long I can last.”

When asked why she didn’t share her suffering with anyone, Stacy says it was mostly the stigma.
“I’d seen the way people with mental health issues were treated, and I didn’t want that to be me,” she says, adding that she was also afraid her illness might affect her acceptance to college, or her plans to go to medical school.

And why not share her struggle with her parents? “I didn’t want to burden them,” says Stacy, an only child.
Her mother, Sharon Hollingsworth, says she never noticed any warning signs of Stacy’s illness beneath her smiles and successes – an experience she uses to caution other parents of teens.

“I think parents think they know everything about their children, and I think in a lot of cases they do,” she says. “But I think there’s also a disconnect between children and parents…dealing with something like depression. I think that there are still things kids are hiding in almost every case.”

Even with her depression, Stacy managed to finish high school in the top of her class, and was accepted to Rutgers University in her home state of New Jersey. But once she got to college, Stacy’s depression, and suicidal impulses, worsened.

One night, after counting out enough prescription medication to commit suicide, she sought help at the campus psychiatric hospital.

“I needed to do something to save my life,” she says. “I had to do something, or I was going to die.”
That hospital stay marked a turning point for Stacy. With the support of her parents, she temporarily withdrew from Rutgers, sought help from a therapist, and eventually found a medication to effectively manage her depression. Stacy also found comfort, and encouragement, in an online community of people suffering with mental illness.

Last spring, Stacy graduated from Rutgers and landed a job with the National Alliance of Mental Illness in New Jersey, an organization dedicated to improving the lives of people who have been affected by mental health issues through advocacy, resources and education. She also founded NAMI-Rutgers, which works solely on campus.

“I think after having gone through my own life-changing experience with mental illness, I feel like I really have a second chance at life,” says Stacy. “It’s amazing to be alive and I want to take however much time I have left to put it to good use.”

For Stacy’s work, Mental Health America presented her with one of six outstanding young advocate awards in 2007 for her efforts to raise awareness of mental health issues among America’s youth, and addressing the issue of stigma.

When asked if she has any words for teens experiencing depression or thoughts of suicide, she says: “First, realize you are not alone – that is so important…Also, come to terms with it and accept yourself. Then, you have to say ‘who do I feel comfortable going to?’ And if there’s not…find someone who can play a role in your recovery.”

Stacy adds: “For the longest time, I never thought I’d be one of the ones who would get better. When I finally did, it surprised me, and it gave me hope…hope is possible.”

For more on Stacy’s story, see her video for MTV’s Half of Us campaign online.

For more on the National Alliance on Mental Illness, log onto NAMI’s Web site.

Edie Magnus, Executive Producer

Dr. Chris Lucas, head of child psychiatry at New York University’s School of Medicine, says it best:

“People only seem to pay attention when there is a major event and when a large number of kids die suddenly together. Whereas kids are dying all the time through gun violence or…though suicide, and there is not much attention paid to that.”

This is precisely how we began to pay attention to all the unheeded cries for help:  it was just after the massacre at Virginia Tech, where so many young people had died suddenly, that we began researching teenage mental illness and rage. Soon, the bigger story came into focus:  All over America, kids were dying by their own hands in far greater numbers than those killed by an enraged school shooter.  Experts we spoke to characterized this as two sides of the same coin: violence turned inward, or unleashed upon others.  Both are the end result of a terrible path that too many kids are on – and one that few of the adults in their lives recognize or understand.

In the nearly two years since we started looking into adolescent mental health, we’ve interviewed scores of experts on depression, anxiety, anger and teen suicide. We entered chat rooms and left postings on a number of Web sites devoted to these topics – and are grateful to the many young people who reached out to tell us their stories. Of the many statistics included in Cry for Help, there is one that stands out: that young people experiencing mental illness like depression and anxiety can go for many years (estimates range from 6 to 23 – which obviously puts them well into adulthood) before they are diagnosed and treated. That’s a lot of silent pain and suffering going under the radar.

Increasingly, schools across the country are feeling compelled to get a handle on the mental health of students. In Cry for Help, we were afforded extraordinary access to two high schools trying two different approaches – which we followed in real time throughout a school year. One of these schools was Hamilton High in Ohio, which had lost four teens to suicide in less than a year’s time.

To us, it seemed the school was using the “It Takes a Village” approach to help students in the wake of the suicides, and to encourage them to open up about their own issues. Teachers, administrators and counselors at HHS volunteered to take part in a series of initiatives that were direct and personal — to find students in emotional pain, to assure them they were not alone, and to offer time and resources to get them additional help if necessary.

The other school we profile is Clarkstown North High School in New York, which launched an equally ambitious effort to reach young people where so many of them now “live” — online. The program allows teens and their parents to seek out information anonymously through a special mental health and suicide prevention Web site.  The theory here is that rather than trying to find the few kids most at risk (which the program’s creator, a New York psychiatrist, Dr. Lucas, likens to finding a needle in a haystack) the goal should be to improve the mental health of the entire student population. In other words, the rising tide lifts all boats.

A young woman named Stacy Hollingsworth gave us invaluable insights into what it feels like to be severely depressed and hide it from the outside world.  Her parents were like so many others:  they thought they knew their child.  The lessons they learned and Stacy’s own account of her journey to the brink of suicide and back are important for anyone who is — or plans to be — raising a child.

There is so much that we in the adult world don’t know about what our kids are saying and feeling.  Cry for Help gives us a chance to listen, and opens a window into their world.  Their stories, and the disturbing statistics on teen suicide, are a clarion call for all of us to start paying more attention every day.

- Edie Magnus, Executive Producer

Written by
Edie Magnus
Mary Murphy

Directed by
Mary Murphy

Director of Photography
Rich White

Edited by
A.M. Baluzy

Associate Producers
Molly Knight Raskin
Alicia Byrdsong
Laura Chapnick

Additional Camera
Scott Winters
David Dellaria
John Borst
Rob Weir

Sound
Jack Norflus
Rick Albright
Tim Dutton
David Baumgartner

Additional Editing
Becka Slade
Lynn Vance

Online Editor
Jaroslaw Ziaja

Production Assistants
Angelica Hester
Zachary Green

Additional footage provided by
Associated Press
Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office
WCBS
WETA

Special Thanks
Hamilton High School
Clarkstown North High School
Ossining Public Library

Project Manager
Rekha Menon

Legal
Shari LaPayover

Publicity
Kellie Specter
Gloria Park

Board of Advisors
Alison Malmon
Dr. Richard A. Friedman
Mark Goulston

Senior Producer
Scott Davis

Executive Producer
Edie Magnus

Executive-in-Charge
Stephen Segaller

Executive-in-Charge
Neal Shapiro

This program was produced by Thirteen which is solely responsible for its content.

© 2009 WNET.ORG

FUNDING PROVIDED BY
Estate of Marya Sielska
Irene Ritter Foundation
Judy Collins
Leon Lowenstein Foundation
Donna and Phil Satow
Marion E. Kentworthy-Sarah H. Swift Foundation

Additional funding was provided by More than 3,000 members of Thirteen