A young girl’s suicide leads her parents to seek all the reasons why : Averting Teen-Age Tragedy

In her pictures, everyone saw the smile and the bright-eyed promise. No one saw the mask.

Like many teen-agers, 17-year-old Lisa White seemed to have it all going for her. She had a 3.3 grade-point average and talked about going to UCLA. She was a cheerleader. She was involved in play production and speech competition. She had a part-time job. Besides, she was pretty and her Asian looks set her apart from the crowd.

But also like many teen-agers seemingly on the threshold of exciting potential, Lisa White was hiding a lot of inner torment.

On Jan. 5, the first day of her last semester at Brea-Olinda High School, Lisa slipped off her mask for the last time. She took an overdose of prescription pills at home and, never regaining consciousness, died three days later. The Orange County coroner’s office is handling her death as a suicide but still awaiting a final toxicology report.

Lisa’s friends, many of whom maintained a hospital vigil, mourned her death. Her parents, Ed and Ethel Shapiro of Brea, have asked themselves repeatedly why they didn’t pick up on the signs of her depression.

But instead of surrendering to the finality of Lisa’s suicide, the Shapiros took action.

The result of their efforts will be two all-school assemblies today for Brea-Olinda students. This evening, another assembly will be held at the school for parents.

The Shapiros hope the assemblies will be the forerunner of an ongoing program to help students, parents and teachers better recognize the warning signs of severe depression and low self-esteem that sometimes lead teen-agers to suicide.

“The commonality in a lot of these problems,” Shapiro said, “seems to be that teen-agers are growing up, wanting separation from their parents, not wanting to really reveal themselves to their parents. There’s a lot more pressure on them, with things like needing better grades to get into certain colleges and with body-image problems. That all seems to lead to low self-esteem and a greater degree of depression.”

Orange County has averaged about eight suicides a year over the last five years in the 13-to-17-year-old age group, a county Health Care Agency official said. The state doesn’t break down its suicide statistics for that age group.

The Shapiros weren’t unaware of the problems teen-agers face. More than once, Lisa had pointed out to her parents girls who were bulimic--victims of an eating disorder characterized by binge eating and then self-induced vomiting. With their easily hidden disorder, bulimics are almost always depressed and may suffer from other psychological disorders.

But it wasn’t until early last summer that Mrs. Shapiro caught Lisa in the same binge-purge cycle and confronted her with it. Lisa admitted to it and saw a therapist.

The Shapiros now say they misjudged the depth of their daughter’s depression. And, they said in an interview last week in their home, it is that anguish that propelled them to act after Lisa’s death.

The Shapiros have limited their public conversations about Lisa, preferring to concentrate on their efforts with the school assemblies.

“I was crushed by it (her death),” said Ethel Shapiro. “She was my flesh and blood. What I’m doing is still searching. Why am I feeling this way? How can I go on? My focus is on my family and Ashlee (the Shapiros’ 4-year-old daughter), but Lisa is still there,” she said, pointing to her heart.

Little Satisfaction

Citing Lisa’s roster of accomplishments, Mrs. Shapiro said: “She was all the things you’d want your daughter to be. But that’s not what it’s all about. Those achievements are of little satisfaction. They’re only there for a moment.”

Instead, she said, parents should let their children know “we love them for who and what they are, not for achievements.”

Ed Shapiro is Lisa’s stepfather and a Brea osteopath. “All those kids who came to the hospital, we watched them pray, watched them cry,” he said. “And then we heard different kids talking about other kids. That this wonderful kid who was sitting there reading the Bible and crying about Lisa . . . was a drunk and cheated in school to get good grades because of pressure his parents put on him to go to such-and-such a college.”

Hearing such travails was somewhat revelatory for the Shapiros. “It was the first time I said to myself, ‘These kids are really nice kids,’ ” Shapiro said. “Before, they were just friends of Lisa’s. Then you listen to them . . . You should hear all these things we heard about what kids do to themselves.”

What they also heard, much to their dismay, was that the teen-agers felt they didn’t have anyone to talk to. Some told the Shapiros things they couldn’t tell their parents. The Shapiros couldn’t help but wonder whether Lisa felt caught in the same bind.

They began investigating what the school district did to detect such severe psychological and emotional problems. They found that, like most school districts, Brea-Olinda doesn’t have an intensive program to target seriously depressed students.

Led to Other Questions

“Why, when bulimia is a common problem with girls, when Lisa could walk around and say, ‘That one is bulimic, this one is bulimic,’ why didn’t the school respond?” Shapiro said.

But that question led to other questions. “Who’s responsibility is it?” Shapiro asked. “Is it the responsibility of the kids at school or is it the responsibility of the parents? How much legal responsibility does the school have in doing these things?”

Brea-Olinda Principal Jean Sullivan says the district does have a program to try to identify troubled or suicidal students but concedes it isn’t an intensive one. She doesn’t know how Brea-Olinda students will respond to today’s programs, but she is hopeful about one of the goals of the program--to set up a peer counseling network to help troubled students.

“I know we have many very sensitive, very caring students and obviously we have students who are troubled,” Sullivan said. “Out of this program we ought to be able to get a coming-together of those two groups.”

At today’s sessions, the main speaker will be Cynthia Rowland McClure, a former television reporter who now lectures and travels the country, talking to teen-agers about their problems.

Although McClure, now 31, was bulimic and wrote a book about it, she says she doesn’t focus on that particular disorder. Like anorexia, or drug and alcohol abuse, bulimia is most likely a cloak for other problems, she says.

“The No. 1 thing I’m hearing from the kids is, ‘I’m hurting because mom and dad didn’t keep the family together,’ ” McClure said. “They also say they’re hurting because they’re lonely. They’ve got people surrounding them, but they could curl up and die. They think if they die, that’ll be the end of it and they’ll be out of the pain.”

‘Stresses They Feel’

Like McClure, the Shapiros don’t want to focus on bulimia. They aren’t certain if Lisa had resumed her binge-purge cycle in the months before her suicide.

“We feel the reasons kids are turning to these things are because of depression and low self-esteem and the stresses they feel,” Shapiro said. “The stresses lead them to not feel good about themselves. If we look back at Lisa, we can see so many reasons that she had to be depressed. It’s upsetting that it is so obvious and in front of our eyes in retrospect, and yet it was so difficult to put it all together.”

The Shapiros think Lisa felt overwhelmed with her range of activities and her perceived need to please people. “Lisa gave friends and her parents and her teachers cues as to what was happening,” Shapiro said. “But no one was able to integrate it and say, ‘This kid is going to commit suicide.’ ”

The Shapiros, who have been married for 10 years, think Lisa didn’t want to burden them with her problems. “She did tell me once, ‘I have to keep a smile all the time. And I’m tired,’ ” Mrs. Shapiro said.

The Shapiros don’t know where their efforts will lead. Ideally, Shapiro says, the school district might add a class or program that helps students cope with the stresses of daily life. Such programs inevitably spark controversy. As a result, they’re rare. The Orange Unified School District began a wide-ranging program three years ago at the junior high and senior high level and now is expanding it to elementary school students. An official there says the federally funded program, which began as a substance abuse effort, has widened its focus to identify the causes of adolescent problems.

The Shapiros say they aren’t looking for scapegoats. Nor are they sparing themselves in their judgments.

“If we had outside help, yeah, we probably could have done more for Lisa,” Shapiro said. “And if we knew the warning signs better. Ethel feels she recognized the warning signs better than I did. Maybe if I was better educated to recognize warning signs. . . . That’s what we’re saying--I wish I had known how serious it was.”

Eager to work with the school district, the Shapiros applaud the district and some other cooperating agencies for setting up the assemblies Tuesday.

For Mrs. Shapiro, the session is another step to understanding what her daughter was trying to say. “To find the answers. . . . I had to help and do what I can to know what these kids are feeling, so I can understand what Lisa was feeling,” she said. “Were her problems that large that I couldn’t have prevented something? Is there something that really works, that really could get through to these kids that commit suicide?”