On Oct. 17, families at Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles received news they must have been dreading for more than a year.

A ninth grader had died at home that morning. It is important for us to share with you that the student took his own life, the school said.

The death of a 15-year-old, whom a classmate later described as someone who defined the meaning of greatest friend, would have been tragic at any school. But at Harvard-Westlake, popular among the Hollywood elite, it was the fourth student to die this way since March 2023. Other community members had recently ended their lives too. Young people are taking their own lives at higher rates than before, and at Harvard-Westlake, the rate appears to be even higher. Sheila Siegel, a former Harvard-Westlake parent and longtime psychologist at the school, recalls experiencing just one student suicide in her more than two decades there, before she left in 2013. The world is a scarier place, Siegel says. Im glad Im so old. Im not worried about global warming, but if I were 16, I would be. Jim Burns, who retired a few years ago as a teacher at Harvard-Westlake, says, I never met a faculty member at the school who didnt deeply care about their kids. For these deaths to happen, something went deeply, deeply wrong.

After the initial deaths, the school hired a director of wellness, relaxed grading policies and said it would pair students with counselors. It brought in puppies and chalk for sidewalk decorating. For a while, the efforts seemed to work.

Then news came of the ninth graders death. He was in the middle school, and it had been just long enough since the last one that people thought it wouldnt happen again. After COVID, the racial reckoning of summer 2020 and the earlier suicides, this school year was supposed to be a return to normal.

Moving forward is a challenge at any place with competition and rigor, observers say. Student suicides are going to be almost an inevitable product of the [elite school] business model, says one veteran of the system. Youre up against people whose families are billionaires. Youre up against people who are astonishingly good-looking. Everybodys really smart. Everybodys really ambitious. Its an environment where if theres any kind of crack or any kind of frailty in you, its going to find it. A Harvard-Westlake senior says the situation has been brutal: I guess we didnt realize that kids could die.

***

Todays Harvard-Westlake dates to 1989, when the Harvard School, an all-boys military boarding school, and the Westlake School for Girls agreed to merge. It now has 875 upper schoolers in Studio City and 745 middle schoolers in Holmby Hills. Jacques Steinberg described it in his 2002 book The Gatekeepers as a high-powered school for the sons and daughters of many of Hollywoods royalty. The reputation hasnt changed much. In the 2021 book Guilty Admissions, Nicole LaPorte called it a rocket launcher to 21st century success.

The alumni roster contains plenty of notable surnames: Collins, Curtis, Platt, Gyllenhaal, Garcetti, Spielberg, Hanks, Moonves, Spelling, Zanuck, Getty. Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman Charlie Munger was on the board until his November 2023 death. Trustees as recently as 2023 included Jane Eisner, Anthony Pritzker, Zillow co-founder Spencer Rascoff, former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, Major League Baseball team owners and bigwigs in finance, law, media and medicine. As at other L.A. prep schools, parents come from the professional class that orbits Hollywood, not just actors and directors, but their plastic surgeons and lawyers, too.

The competitive mindset starts before students even get in; fewer than a quarter of applicants do. Its kind of everything that people say about private schools, but at the extreme end, says an independent-schools veteran, the Hollywood fame, the enormous wealth, the academic pressure to get into top Ivies. Compared with many other area prep schools, this one has more students and more money. The head of school made $1.8 million the past fiscal year, according to a recent school tax filing. It employs college counselors who are on speaking terms with Ivy League admissions officers, says Jon Reider, an independent college consultant and former Stanford admissions officer. For many families, the ROI on the nearly $50,000 annual tuition pays off; about 17 percent of the class of 2024 went to Ivies.

But such results can come at a cost, alumni and others say. An L.A. independent schools insider describes the work ethic there as a pathological rigor in which student health takes a backseat to rsum building and competition and college admissions. A 2019 poll in Harvard-Westlakes student newspaper, The Chronicle, found that of 317 student respondents, 111 reported having thought about suicide and 182 reported experiencing depression. Alumni talk about cutthroat college admissions and instances of students stealing notes to sabotage classmates. The newspaper would publish a list of students and the colleges where they were heading. The student mindset, according to an alumna, centered on, What do I need to do in order to get into a top school?

Students today might have it even worse, with social media and talk of threats to the environment and democracy. When the kids are facing these existential questions and theyre told that you have to get 100 percent or you have to make a 5 on 12 APs or youre not going to get into college, the L.A. insider says, youre going to have kids that just say, Screw it, I cant do this.

***

The first of the recent suicides happened in October 2022. An alumnus at Brown took his life. He had been a star swimmer who set Harvard-Westlake records. A tribute in The Chronicle didnt call his death a suicide.

The following month, an older alumnus and Harvard-Westlake parent, who worked in the entertainment industry, killed himself. Then on March 2, 2023, a 15-year-old sophomore took her life. She had played varsity field hockey and loved photography. A visual arts teacher memorialized her in the student newspaper as sensitive and talented, a quiet, perceptive observer of the world around her. The teacher wrote, Were not supposed to say we have our favorites but here it is, she was a favorite.

The news about what happened spread quickly in classrooms and group chats before any official word. Hours later, the email arrived. It is with profound sadness that we write to share the heartbreaking news, it said. At this time, we do not know the cause The email said there would be an assembly and that classes would continue, though teachers could provide time for sharing thoughts and feelings.

About seven weeks later, on April 19, an 18-year-old senior took his life. Coming on the heels of a recent car crash that resulted in the death of a school maintenance worker, some students felt like they were living through ongoing tragedy. This time, the school said the student death was a suicide. Some students found out as they arrived on campus in the morning. As I was entering, the security guard told me, Go to the assembly, something happened to another student, recalls the senior who spoke with THR. I was like, Oh, no, not again.

After the second suicide, the school announced a policy to help with the trauma and pressure: Students would continue turning in work and taking tests, but their grades could only go up, not down. We want them to be able to continue to have the ability to learn without the added stress and worry of a negative impact to their end-of-year grades, Head of Upper School Beth Slattery told students by email. Still, students went from sadness to trepidation. It was very much a fear of, who will be next? the senior says. The answer came just eight days later. The father of the first student, the 15-year-old sophomore, ended his life.

The school tried to offer support. It offered special counseling for the Asian American and Pacific Islander community, to which the first student belonged. At least one teacher swapped out a book they planned to read As I Lay Dying. A science teacher told The Chronicle, Most students have, predictably, just tuned out. Meanwhile, school president Rick Commons said, Its critical for us as an institution to grow and evolve in ways that respond to the tragedies weve experienced, according to the student newspaper. I think that our community of parents and students recognize that the mental health and emotional health challenges are not localized at Harvard-Westlake [but] are broad challenges for adolescents that seem to be afflicting families across the country right now. He added, We are experiencing enormous and tragic pain that is associated with the larger problem, which doesnt have us looking away from it, but has us looking right at it and recognizing that we have to evolve as we think about [those who died].

The messaging seemed to be: This is more than just a Harvard-Westlake problem. And indeed, a few days after the parent took his life, the U.S. surgeon general declared an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. When summer arrived, everyone hoped the tragedies were behind them. What they might not have known was that, according to researchers, school breaks can be particularly vulnerable times for kids who are suffering.

On June 30, about three weeks into summer break, a 16-year-old student took his life. The loss we are experiencing is immense and unimaginable, his parents wrote on a tribute web page. They said their son, who had been in training to volunteer for a teen mental health hotline, had talked about struggling once before and that his enormous heart also caused him to feel emotional pain with the same intensity.

Without using the word, the school now seemed to acknowledge the risk of contagion, in which exposure to suicide or suicidal behavior influences others to attempt self-harm. The counseling team cautioned parents: While teenagers who knew [the student] are at a higher risk, it is important to note that anyone touched by the suicide may be at an increased risk of exhibiting suicidal behavior.

Harvard-Westlake defeated Salesian College Prep to win the 2024 CIF State Open Division boys basketball championship. Keith Birmingham/MediaNews Group/Pasadena Star-News/Getty Images ***

Nearly 40 years ago, a People magazine cover declared: TEEN SUICIDE: Why are our children dying? The problem persists today. Suicide rates in the general population went up 37 percent between 2000 and 2022. The rate for 10-to-14-year-olds tripled between 2007 and 2018, then stayed mostly the same through 2021. For 15-to-19-year-olds, there was a 57 percent increase from 2009 to 2017 before stabilizing. If we go back quite a number of years, then were looking at a very concerning trend, says Christine Yu Moutier, chief medical officer at the American Foundation for SuicidePrevention.

Why the uptick? Moutier points to social media, anti-trans laws, hate crimes, racial discrimination and marginalization as just some of the stressors impacting young peoples mental health. Another is COVID and the experience of having to shift between in-person and online learning. You could certainly point out the massive amount and frequency of transitions that have occurred in these young peoples lives, especially aligning with their psychological developmental milestones, Moutier says.

Like many other schools during the pandemic, Harvard-Westlake became online-only in the spring of 2020, then hybrid, before returning to fully in person in fall 2022. Experts have sounded the alarm on the pandemic-era deterioration of student mental health. In 2021, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the Childrens Hospital Association jointly declared a national state of emergency in childrens mental health. The American Medical Association made a similar proclamation in June 2023. Mental health emergency room visits increased for young people during the pandemic, and experts have said more recently that the effects are lingering even as the formal public health emergencyhasended.

Academic pressure is also a stressor. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation researchers reported in 2018 that while causes of stress for young people include poverty, trauma and discrimination, another is an excessive pressure to excel. Ned Johnson, a prominent test prep tutor in the Washington area, has witnessed this firsthand. Loving parents have used their wealth and wits and opportunity to protect their kids from poverty, trauma and discrimination, he says. This is why they send them to independent schools, this wonderful bubble. And yet, oftentimes the children feel that theyre being put under all this pressure to achieve. He says he knew of one student who vomited before school every day because she wasso anxious.

Helen Hsu, a clinical psychological at Stanford whose resources Harvard-Westlake counselors shared with parents after the suicides, says, Its not as simple as, Oh, its all the tiger parents, but we do know that these pressure-cooker places do have an unusual number of losses like this. Poverty is a risk factor for suicide, but these are not those kinds of cases, she says. These are families often that have all the indicators that we think would be associated with great health. And I think it does hit people then as even more shocking.

In an environment like a school, there can be a ripple effect. Julie Cerel, a professor and director of the Suicide Prevention and Exposure Lab at the University of Kentucky, found that for each person who died by suicide, 135 people were exposed. When a suicide happens in a school, for example, every kid in that school knows the child that has taken their life, and theres some degree of impact, she says. While deaths in a cluster defined as suicides, suicide attempts or self-harm events that occur more in a time and space than would be expected account for just 1 percent to 5 percent of all suicides, they can be particularly devastating.

Experts make clear that suicide isnt contagious like the flu. Nearly half of people who die by suicide have an underlying mental health condition. Most show warning signs, such as talking about wanting to die and feeling hopeless, increasingly using drugs or alcohol or withdrawing or feeling isolated. Contagion is, really, referring to those individuals who already have some pre-existing vulnerability, Moutier says. The exposure to a peers suicide is a risk factor. But remember, suicide is not known to occur with just one risk factor.

Its not just close friends who are at risk of contagion, says Scott Poland, professor and co-director of the Suicide and Violence Prevention Office at Nova Southeastern University. Mostly, its other kids that have already been thinking about suicide. Potential school suicide contagions occasionally make headlines, including in Palo Alto and around Colorado Springs. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sometimes investigates potential clusters. (A CDC spokesperson told THR the team has not done a cluster probe at Harvard-Westlake.) All of that makes memorializing a student without risking contagion a balancing act. Moutier says, Its very, very tricky.

Members of the school community attended the Alive Together: Uniting to Prevent Suicide walk around Exposition Park on Oct. 1, 2023. Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images ***

In summer 2023, Harvard-Westlake leadership worked on figuring out what to do. The response would need to go beyond chalk and puppies. So, that summer, administrators, counselors and student representatives worked on a plan. The students met multiple times over Zoom and then shared ideas with the adults.

Commons, the school president, had dealt with a suicide issue before. When he was headmaster at Groton School in Massachusetts in 2010, a student killed himself after Groton apparently urged him to withdraw or face expulsion for allegedly bullying a classmate. The incident made local headlines. More recently, in 2020, Hollywood producer and financier Steve Bing took his life. Bing was an alumnus and the son of Harvard-Westlake trustee Peter Bing. The family name adorns the middle schools performing arts center.

On Aug. 1, 2023, the school published the results of those summer sessions in an eight-page Wellness Plan. The plan included creating a wellness center; hiring a director of wellness (suicide prevention training would later be in the job posting); gatekeeper training for faculty, staff and students; suicide prevention training for parents; and reexamining academic policies. The school would pair every upper-school student with a counselor.

Previously, the schools approach to wellness largely involved a long-running program called Peer Support. Students starting in 10th grade could stay late once a week to eat food and talk through issues in student-led groups. Siegel, the former school psychologist, estimates that typically a few hundred upper schoolers participated. We had incidents, every school has incidents, she says. But we pretty much had our finger on the pulse. Julian Andreone, who graduated in 2022, looks back on that program critically. Its a really bizarre system where students who have no experience in counseling or handling traumatic issues are expected to sit there and grieve trauma with other students and give them advice the best they can, he says.

The school responded in multiple ways that were right out of the guidelines, like gatekeeper training and counseling. But the guidelines also warn against assemblies. There can be mixed messages when schools say to get sleep and practice mindfulness but then assign so much homework that students are up all night, Stanfords Hsu says. Ive worked in high schools where theyre giving messages that we care about your wellness and all of this, but theyre also in the same newsletter like, Look at our student who won this giantaward.

A junior seemed to express something similar in The Chronicle, writing that the wellness initiatives added to the pressure. Students days are packed with tests, projects, homework and extracurricular activities, leaving little time to focus on mental health, she wrote. Rather than feeling supported by the schools new plan, students have found themselves bombarded with well-intentioned but often excessive measures that have done more to add to their stress than alleviate it.

The senior who spoke with THR says he worked with counselors to form a mental health club. They really cared and they did want to do what they could to help, he says. But the fundamental truth is that theyre not kids. They dont understand exactly what were going through. We have an entirely unique set of problems that they never had to face while they were growing up.

For a year, the situation quieted down. The director of wellness arrived in June 2024. A new school year began, and a school email proclaimed, New Year, New Beginnings. On Sept. 29, students attended a 5-kilometer walk to honor their classmates who had died. This is such a great way to continue their memory, a senior told The Chronicle. Ive [gained] a sense of optimism about the direction that were going around suicide prevention.

Less than three weeks later, the ninth grader took his life.

The Campus Described as a rocket launcher to 21st century success, Harvard-Westlake has two state-of-the-art campuses, including the upper school in Studio City. Dean Musgrove/Los Angeles Daily News/Getty Images ***

By all accounts, the ninth grader was a unique and beloved kid. He sometimes wore a kilt (including to his bar mitzvah), a ghillie suit, a bright red cape and a 10-gallon hat. He was a legend at camp and led Harvard-Westlakes flight club, where he operated a drone with goggles that showed him what the devices camera saw.

At a memorial service, Rabbi Sharon Brous of IKAR, the progressive L.A. congregation to which the students family belonged she gave the invocation at the Democratic National Convention in August seemed to address both the communal dread and the possibility it could lead to further devastation.

I know that there are people sitting in this room today who feel that you are trapped in that black box, she said. Even when that darkness feels impenetrable, it often can be pierced. It can be pierced by love and by presence and by the gentle reminder that every day now there are new remedies and new medications and new approaches, and that every day now there is something worth living for. Then she addressed the boys friends. I really need you to hear me that you are not alone, that theres help all around you, she said. We can meet each other in the depths. As the ceremony concluded, renditions of Beethovens Moonlight Sonata and a harp version of Kate Bushs Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) played over thespeakers.

Immediately after the suicide, Head of Middle School Jon Wimbish urged students who knew of someone struggling to tell an adult though he acknowledged that adults were struggling, too. The middle school student newsmagazine included crisis hotlines and other information in its coverage. This time, however, there would be noassembly.

A school spokesperson declined THRs interview requests for this report but said in a statement: Harvard-Westlake is devastated by the recent death of one of our students. We are doing everything we can to help our school community to mourn this tragic loss. As we and the students family grieve, we ask for privacy.

Some feel that the school is doing the best it can in an extremely difficult position. Theres so much that happens beyond 8 to 3 that we just cant control, the current senior says. Others are more critical of the school. A lot of the people in the school community are grasping for answers, says Andreone, the recent alumnus. The way that you address it from suicide one to suicide two to suicide three prevents suicide four and suicide five from happening. One L.A. private school search consultant knows of multiple families that pulled applications to Harvard-Westlake not because of the suicides, but because of how the school handled them.

Changes are underway. The school recently announced it would abandon Advanced Placement courses, citing student stress. Other independent schools have done this, though some students have expressed concerns about what it means for college applications. Postvention work will continue for another two years, according to Katie Hurley of the Jed Foundation, which does youth suicide prevention and has been on the ground at Harvard-Westlake. The work they are doing is difficult and takes time, Hurley said by email. Any loss by suicide is traumatic for a community, but multiple losses require careful assessment and implementation of strategic planning to heal and move forward.

It could happen at almost any of the private schools where there is extreme wealth and a lot of students who are more on their own at times than they should be, says Susan Turner Jones, who has taught at a handful of L.A. private schools, including Harvard-Westlake. She lost a brother to suicide decades ago. Its really important for students to come to understand how their action, if they were to take such an action, would live forever as pain in the people that they love, in their hearts.

There are reasons to be optimistic. After going up for many years, the suicide rates for youth and young adults have recently started going down, though the data is provisional. If we look at the past several years, says Moutier, there are actually some glimmers of hope.

For the Suicide Crisis Lifeline, call or text 988.

These are families that often have all the indicators that we think would be associated with great health. And I think it does hit people then as even more shocking. Helen Hsu, psychologist

Its a really bizarre system where students who have no experience in counseling are expected to grieve trauma with other students and give them advice. Harvard-Westlake alumnus

This story appeared in the Dec. 13 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.