Placing guards or monitoring on the tracks only eliminates one method of suicide. It does not help treat mental health issues. Suicidal youth need inpatient treatment. Neither The Children’s Hospital at Stanford nor our County’s hospital offer a single bed to treat youth who are suicidal. How many children have to die?

Agree with above poster. We need to work on the root cause.

Whether the city government gets involved or not is one matter, but we cannot escape the fact that the root cause is related to the total imbalance in how we view education on the Peninsula. The extreme emphasis on grades, tests, and academic advancement for its own sake have run out of control. The pressure put on this generation to measure success by these metrics is unhelpful and unethical.

We need to help equip schools with tools on how to train students to become balanced, whole people, with higher and now meaningful goals than simply scoring well on the SAT. That there are higher experiences and purposes to life than simply going to the "best" college and getting the "best" job.

Even Google studied it's own workforce and found that the most important quality inn their employees was not academic success, or IQ, but emotional intelligence.

Life is so much more than a narrow definition of intelligence, and there's no better time to start training our children to realize their own potential than now.

It's time to make a real change.

"I'm not particularly interested in the city becoming a mental health provider" said Hicks.

However Hicks is interested in MV becoming an RV housing and safe parking provider.

All of these issues are stepping in to the realm of social services. Where do we draw the line as a city? It has to stop somewhere we can't do it all. And before someone accuses me of being heartless, please know that I have a teen who is suffering from mental health issues. Never did I think it is the city's job to assist me with this issue.

The city council needs to reset their boundaries and priorities around 3 priorities and make policy decisions based on that. It seems they try to legislate every issue that comes up, whether it is national, regional, local or even global (gas ban).

I just don't get it. What are the priorities for this council?

[Post removed due to disrespectful comment or offensive language]

Silicon Valley is full of wealthy liberals who virtue signal about being inclusive but this is fake, fake, fake! They don't really care.

Let's do the best we can to educate our youth on mental health and us on recognizing potential issues. (Not everybody agrees but) maybe it's wouldn't be the worst thing if our local govt spared a small portion towards suicide prevention/ mental health resources/awareness

Some people feel this is not their problem to deal with. But it is. I went to Palo Alto schools in the 1970s. Nobody ever stepped in front of a train then. And we had grades of course - it wasn't any easier than today. This is a community issue that we should not ignore.

I welcome the city finaly acting and addressing the suicides. I understand suicide is a behavior coupled with a context. We may not know the context but perhaps we can take away the components that leads to an attempt. The experts say that suicide is not simply the act of a depressed person at a moment of vulnerability. It’s a depressed person at a particular moment combined with a readily available lethal means. Teens in our area don’t always have a gun or a large stash of pills, but the Caltrain, a method highly lethal, is easily at their disposal any time of day! We install car alarm and driveways, and front porch lights to reduce the opportunity for criminals to commit a crime. So why not put in place preventive measures to block access to the tracks? The last thing a desperate person on an emotional low or an angry teen on an emotional roller coaster needs is access to a lethal weapon. The saving lives and keeping our community safe should be a top priority. I feel the stigma and collective shame that families and the communities feel hinders their effort to push and demand immediate action. I believe the silence on the part of media, lack of effort by the cities and Caltrain officials is a deliberate tactic to avoid liability. I am glad mountain view is finally is addressing the suicides. I just don't think the root cause is something the city needs to be looking in to at this time. Just remove the means, then look in to the root cause.

There is a rumor that MVHS is going to have "Challenge Day" for all their students. I think this would be a FABULOUS thing for them and our community. They do such a great job building compassion and inclusion. They had a small group at the school do it last year. But with the recent suicide, having the entire school go through the program is definitely the right thing to do. Thank you, school administrators, for approving this. The students and their parents will appreciate what you have done.

Challenge Day is an amazing program, expansion to all students (and middle schoolers) would greatly help all students. Treating social emotional learning as equal to any core subject would be transformative.

The City of Palo Alto just celebrated the 10th anniversary of Project Safety Net, a community initiative focused on prevention of youth suicides. TEN YEARS! Hope Mountain View will not reinvent the wheel and will look north for guidance on next steps.

Look North- Unfortunately, Project Safety Net has not been successful at eliminating youth suicide in Palo Alto. In fact, there have been several youth who have died by suicide in the past ten years. Youth who are having a mental health crisis need immediate psychiatric care. As a parent whose teenager reported having a suicide plan during a major depressive episode, our family experienced the inadequacy of treatment options in our county. None of the hospitals with emergency rooms in Santa Clara County including Stanford’s Children’s Hospital will admit a youth for inpatient treatment. None. The closest hospital to Mountain View and Palo Alto offering such care is the Adolescent Psychiatric Unit at Mills Pennisula in San Mateo. If your child is not yet a teen, your family will most often be sent from a Santa Clara County ER to Sacramento. No community initiative focused on means restriction can replace necessary medical intervention.

Please consider an end-of-year DONATION of $$ or some of your CAPITAL-GAINED STOCK to CHAC - a local community mental health organization. It already does such counseling with children/youth/families.

CHAC (Community Health Awareness Council) is a quasi-government Joint Powers Authority. The City and all three school districts serving Mountain View public students are official members of CHAC!

their address (drop in envelope or mail donations) 590 W. El Camino Real
web link Web Link


Councilwoman Abe-Koga/ good call! Now, as a legislator: just to start get an Agenda Item to increase the CHAC city contribution by 10%-25% in $$ and 'earmark' it for "MV youth suicide prevention." Easy peasy!
[BTY the City via Shoreline Community tax diversion district still takes millions per year out of the revenue of the MVWSD and MVLA. So Shoreline could join the CHAC JPA and come up with $25,000 to do this to 'preserve the future of tech workers growing up and being educated locally.' A will? A way! (and all legal within the confines of the wording of the Shoreline 1969 formation special statute)

YEAH McAlister! "putting some money where our mouths are." Another Berkeley alum who believes in the power of local government to fulfill the national 1789 promise of "promote the general Welfare."