Three teen suicides shake Nantucket

Island's losses mirror an alarming rate among Bay State youth

A quote from Eleanor Roosevelt on a wall at Nantucket High School, which got word of the most recent suicide Jan. 8. (VINCENT DEWITT FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE)

NANTUCKET - First the islanders buried Vaughn Mitchell Peterson, a 15-year-old Nantucket High School freshman who hanged himself at his family's home on the windswept hills last February.

Nine months later they buried high school senior Kathryn Wilder MacLellan, 17, who poisoned herself with carbon monoxide in her car last October on the west side of shrub-encrusted Mill Hill.

After mental health officials reported that high school junior William Soverino, 16, killed himself on Jan. 8, fear spilled across the island as residents grappled with the third teenage suicide on Nantucket in 11 months.

"Everybody's going, 'Is my child next?' " said antiques dealer David Place, who has a 12-year-old daughter.

"What if it is somebody I'm close to?" asked Rachel Foulkes, 15, a sophomore at Nantucket High School who knew Soverino. "It's kind of scary, because they talk about chain reactions."

The deaths have left Nantucket residents and mental health officials trying to figure out the reasons behind the spate of youth suicides that has struck Massachusetts in the past decade - and how to prevent them in the future.

After the 40,000 tourists who inun date the island in the summer leave its idyllic beaches, elegant manors, and quaint hills, most of Nantucket's stores close for the winter, and shuttered storefronts line the downtown in rows of gray. Young people on the island describe bleak winters laced with a sense of helplessness and isolation. There are few jobs available for students, and adult expectations of academic success are set high. The two-hour boat ride that separates the island from the mainland seems to take an eternity, and the remoteness adds to the sensation that one student described as hopelessness.

"So much pressure is put on you to succeed, go to college," said the 18-year-old student, who knew all three teenage suicide victims and asked not to be identified. "What if you don't want to go? What if you don't get in?"

Nantucket has an indoor ice rink and a Boys & Girls Club. There is a high school swim team and a varsity basketball team, of which Soverino was a member. There is a drama club. Kate MacLellan played on the girls' soccer team.

"It's a very privileged community with kids who supposedly have everything," said Place, the antiques dealer. "We're obviously all not getting something."

After school, many teenagers hang out over paper cups of fragrant latte at the Bean coffee shop, where barista Jill Page, 28, recalled her high school years as "the darkest time of my life."

"It's hard enough being a teenager, but being a teenager on this island was really trying," Page said. "The darkness, the isolation."

Generally, teenage suicides are rare and seldom come in clusters, mental health officials say. But between 2004 and 2006, four teenagers killed themselves in Needham. Three members of Wellesley High School's class of 2007 committed suicide between 2004 and 2007. In the first nine months of 1997, six teenagers killed themselves in South Boston, and about 70 others were hospitalized for attempting suicide.

Between 400 and 500 Massachusetts residents each year commit suicide, according to the state Department of Public Health. In 2006, there were at least 437 suicides, 13 of them by people 19 or younger, according to the department's preliminary data.

Thirteen percent of Massachusetts teenagers who responded to a survey conducted by the Department of Public Health in 2005 said they had seriously considered suicide. Six percent said they had attempted suicide.

The state allocated $75,000 last year for suicide prevention programs in schools.

Even when suicides come in clusters, they "almost never occur because of one single issue," said Alan Holmlund, who heads suicide prevention programs at the Department of Public Health. But he said seeing their peers commit suicide may encourage teenagers who have been considering it but might not have attempted it otherwise. Such copycat phenomena are more likely in tightknit communities such as Nantucket, where the high school has only 400 students.

As Nantucket residents struggle to understand what drove the teenagers to suicide, they are uncovering an undercurrent of social problems.

Nantucket's 10,000 year-round residents have higher rates of alcohol and drug use, depression, and seasonal affective disorder than the statewide rates, said Peter Swenson, who heads the island's mental health agency. The rate of suicide attempts on Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, and Cape Cod is also higher than statewide. At least two Nantucket adults killed themselves in the last 18 months, Swenson said. In addition to the three student deaths, he said, there were a number of suicide attempts among high school students in the last year.

"Why it's escalating we don't know," Swenson said at the school last week. No Nantucket High student had committed suicide since 1945 until Peterson killed himself last winter. Nantucket police have not officially confirmed that Soverino's death was a suicide. Soverino's family and friends declined to speak to the Globe.

At the school, outside the conference room, someone has taped a handmade poster quoting Eleanor Roosevelt in black marker on a piece of green cardboard: "One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life." School officials and Nantucket and state mental health officials have been using the room to set up a suicide prevention program and, inside, the dry-erase board bears scrawled explanations about grief.

Principal George Kelly has trouble finishing sentences when he talks about his lost students.

"The fact that we're talking about three deaths of students in a very short period of time," he said, then trailed off. "That's not how it's supposed to be. . . .

"I can't find the right word. There are no easy answers here."

Anna Badkhen can be reached at abadkhen@globe.com.