Strange Contagion

by Lee Daniel Kravetz

  As a son of Silicon Valley, well aware of its emphasis on education, Habib has found his students to be dangerously ignorant of the emotional processes taking place within and around them. Catching emotions is inevitable. With no way to stop people from contracting them, Habib has started teaching his students the language tools they lack.

  “My students can’t regulate and manage strong emotions if they don’t have the words to identify the feelings in the first place,” he explains.

  Teaching this skill set seems easy enough, except that there’s a difference between teaching to the common core and teaching to the invisible. The reason for this is as much biological as it is philosophical. Concrete learning takes place in the brain’s neocortex, the conductor of all abilities analytical and technical, conceptual and logical. The language of empathy, however, requires a far different dialect. It engages the neurotransmitters of the limbic system, the emotional center of the mind.

  Beginning with the first cluster, Habib suspected that if he were able to teach his students how to identify the emotional processes taking place within them, then they might be able to understand and regulate these emotions the moment they catch them.

  As we talk, his efforts recall for me the tale of the Oracle of Delphi, an ancient Greek story about interpretation. The myth tells of a priestess who sees the future by inhaling trance-inducing vapors. The rub is that, in her manic state, her words come out as gibberish, so it is up to the priests and poets to translate her prattle into coherent prophecies. Like interpreting gibberish, teaching emotional intelligence is about interpreting unintelligible and impulsive reactions, putting words to what was once unrecognizable, and learning the language to decipher meaning from the unknown.

  Emotional intelligence programs began to catch in the United States in the 1990s under the leadership of chief architects like psychologists Peter Salovey, John D. Mayer, Martin Seligman, and Daniel Goleman. While people and organizations succeed through intellectual and technical skills, an awareness of emotions and our ability to adjust and best control them, they suggest, is as much, if not more important, than many other skill sets. Understanding and managing emotions, Goleman writes, is also a protective factor against both suicidal thoughts and actual attempts.

  Without an awareness of emotion, there is a perception of death without true consequence. Discouraging suicide hinges on the ability one has to fully imagine the immeasurable grief that such a tremendous loss will generate in the loved ones left behind. If only we knew what to say when someone asks us, How are you doing? How are you feeling? How’s life? What’s on your mind? Without awareness of emotion, there’s no honest way to answer. Where Silicon Valley eschews emotional intelligence for intellectual brilliance, social and emotional learning becomes an instruction manual for people who do not know how to operate the very system that controls them.

  Thus, in 2011, Habib launched a pilot emotional contagion awareness program in earnest. He opened his economics classes with a five-minute silent meditation to make his students conscious of their mental chatter. What began as an awkward experiment became a self-sustaining student-initiated practice. “I noticed that, within twelve weeks, self-reported anxiety in the classroom significantly declined,” he tells me. “I could see it, too. It was a visceral change. My students were able to concentrate better. They smiled more. Their grades were stronger. They just seemed healthier.” With results like this, he asked permission to offer the country’s first positive psychology class ever taught at an American high school. Usually, electives at Gunn High reach capacity at twenty-five students. The moment he opened enrollment, more than a hundred people applied. “They were hungry for something like this. Look, academics are important, but so is understanding how to be more aware of our inner thoughts, sensations, and emotions, and using that information to self-regulate, even save each other’s lives.”

  Habib encourages his students to talk about their frustrations out loud and to acknowledge whether they feel heard, and in so doing identify, among other emotions, their sadness, happiness, despair, and unease. They come away recognizing symptoms, too, what it means when they experience an accelerated heartbeat, the sweat on their skin, a shortness of breath, a tightening in the chest. The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning has since found that schools that heavily invest in social and emotional learning programs show systemic change. Habib sees kids helping each other manage their anxiety and treat themselves much more kindly than ever before.

  Trained to have a nuanced understanding of emotions, for the first time ever his students show a deeper desire for happiness. That goes for educators as well. Because burnout dulls sharpness of perception, it becomes harder for teachers to recognize the signs of emotional and psychological distress in their students. Since emotional intelligence programs have gone into effect at Gunn High, students and teachers have recognized and flagged more than fifty students a year for suicidal thinking and have sent many of them on for professional emotional support. “If we imagine the action of a vaccine not just in terms of how it affects a single body, but also in terms of how it affects the collective body of a community, it is fair to think of vaccination as a kind of banking of immunity. Contributions to this bank are donations to those who cannot or will not be protected by their own immunity,” writes Eula Biss. “. . . [M]ass vaccination becomes far more effective than individual vaccination.” At Gunn High, emotional intelligence is as much a collective vaccination as it is an individual one, reliant on the community’s capacity to recognize and to act.

  Habib tells me that once his students gain such awareness, he has something he can work with. “You can say to a student, ‘All right, you feel inferior relative to others, and you feel anxious when you’re about to have a test. Okay, great. Let’s actually tackle that. Let’s give you some concrete skills that you can use before a test to relieve anxiety. Or let’s give you concrete skills that you can use in order to deal with this question of inferiority.’ At this point, we’re having an entirely different conversation than we’ve ever been able to have in the past here.”

  Yet inherent in this calculation is another paradox. The best salve for negative emotional contagions continues to be the purposeful sharpening of one’s emotional awareness and the acquisition of coping tools. But the consistency of social contagions is second only to the absurdity of their rubric; the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences points out that, while emotional attunement and empathy fight symptoms, social contagions of emotion spread faster among people who are themselves aware of the emotions of others. To be emotionally attuned to people is also to be emotionally vulnerable and therefore susceptible to them. Empathy becomes both our redeemer and the orchestrator of our undoing.

  Perhaps the trick, submits Habib, is to create an army of what might be called interrupters. Habib trains school educators and students in the use of tools of emotion recognition and what to do when they encounter people edging toward a dangerous breaking point. But there’s no reason for this training to end with the people closest to these students. A problem of this magnitude requires a solution that does not stop with the schools. We must train Uber drivers, restaurant staff, hairstylists, massage therapists, gardeners, baristas, and guitar buskers, each stranger on the street, every neighbor on the block. They need to know the signs and symptoms and public services available when people ensnared in the elements of this strange contagion show up in their shops, in the backseats of their cars, in the last rows of their classrooms.

  In the end, literally everyone in this town becomes an interrupter.

  Part VIII

  The Community

  “Four things annul the decree that seals a person’s fate; namely alms, prayer, change of name, and change of deeds.”

  ―The Talmud

  “Strange things blow in through my window on the wings of the night wind and I don’t worry about my destiny.”

  —Carl Sandburg

  Chapte
r 28

  All the Answers Lead Back Home

  I’m not sure how I’ve missed it before. I’ve made a dozen visits to Gunn High since my first appointment six years ago with Roni Habib; yet, turning into the school on a spring afternoon in 2016, I notice for the first time that directly across the street from the entrance is Alta Mesa Memorial Park. A cemetery.

  The train tracks are two miles to the east of Gunn High, but directly south of campus, at the doorway of the school, sits the graveyard’s low perimeter wall. The path leads beyond a steel gate and into vivid green lawns. Sprinkler streams cross overtrimmed hedges and trees and sun-drenched meadows and stately mausoleums as white as sunlight beating against Jerusalem stone. Steve Jobs is buried in here someplace. David Packard and William Shockley are as well. So is Frederick Terman, the Stanford provost who cultivated the relationship between the university and tech companies that formed the bedrock of this town. Each grave site within the oceanic swell of headstones is connected to a person and a legacy prompting ideas, emotions, and behaviors, even in their passive conditions. For us, this is the place where the line ends, but for a strange contagion it’s so far from the end of the line.

  I pull into Gunn High’s visitors’ lot and as I cross the drive to the awning the cemetery is on my left. I have to question what a cemetery at the gateway to the school might prime in the most vulnerable. Gollwitzer spoke to me about the everyday things in the environment that we register unconsciously, these objects and images we don’t think twice about that somehow influence, move, inspire, and prompt us. And damned if that cemetery isn’t right there, like a canvasser handing out leaflets to the students streaming in and out of the campus. Beyond the tall electronic marquee, titans rock boastfully flashing across its screen, it’s the first thing that students see.

  Everything about Silicon Valley is centered in this cemetery: its founders and tech celebrities and Stanford academics, all buried here along with the fear that the end of the line represents. Maybe I’m reading too much into this. But given all that’s happened over the past six years—eight deaths and the aftermath—it’s hard not to see the parallels or to consider the correlations. And consider them I have, each and every one of them, the primes and the cascades, the social contagions both deleterious and advantageous.

  The visitor parking is unusually full today, making me circle back around to find a spot in the student lot. Walking toward the main office, I join up with a group of women carrying portable massage chairs into the school, a service for students during finals week. I groan. It’s the conundrum of the self-fulfilling prophecy: Like the presence of hazmat suites or visitors from infectious disease control in places that warrant neither, expectation promotes manifestation like a sugar pill. If the students see that people expect them to be so stressed over finals that they need a massage chair, they will stress themselves out enough that they actually do need one.

  There’s something everlastingly humbling at any age about waiting to meet with a school principal. It is just before the end of the school day and I’m one of a half dozen people in the waiting area of the main office. To be honest, I’ve been hesitant to meet Denise Herrmann. Until now, every teacher, every student, and every parent I’ve reached out to about the suicide clusters has shown a guarded willingness to tell me their stories, to have their perspective become a part of the record. I’ve worried about talking to Herrmann because, if anybody in town has a reason to remain quiet or tow a party line, if there is such a line, it is the principal, the face of a school that’s gone to great lengths to put on a show of calm, de-amplify tension, and avoid undesirable publicity.

  A little less than a year ago, the Atlantic published a cover story about the Silicon Valley suicide clusters. Obviously it wasn’t the typical tech-related Silicon Valley coverage people around here are used to reading about themselves. The spotlight fell on the broken parts of the region and, more specifically, the town of Palo Alto. The story picked up after the 2014 resurgence of the cluster phenomenon at Gunn High. It included scenes of the immediate aftermath of Cameron Lee’s death, of teachers comforting people in their classrooms and in the school hallways, of Gunn High hosting suicide prevention experts from Stanford University, of a parent reading a child’s suicide note aloud at a house gathering. By my second reading of the article, the names, faces, school buildings, and questions about the clusters rose up in me like brackish bay water. None of the pieces of the puzzle it presented was new to us here. By now we were all well aware of Gunn High’s top national ranking, and we’d considered the contrast between that title and its more regionally known designation among some as the suicide high school. I wondered how many times we needed to hear that the ten-year suicide rate for high schools here is roughly five times the national average, or that 12 percent of high school students in this town have seriously contemplated suicide over the past year. We’d all heard the charges people made against parents who impose a high standard of excellence upon their kids to the point that it drives some to feel isolated from their families, and others to learn how to hide their failures well. We’d questioned the influence of so-called tiger mothers raising their children according to strict traditional Chinese ways. More than 40 percent of this town is made up of Asians, and, yes, right or wrong, we’ve deliberated, as the article pointed out, over how the culture shift might be “poisoning the culture of the entire school.”

  We already understood all of this. Where had all of these facts gotten us? And now these ugly and obvious truths were laid bare for the rest of the world to read. Our little secret had begun to slip beyond the confines of the community. As Gerald Russell said, once information is out in the world, no one can put it back in the bottle.

  Given this, I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if Denise Herrmann had received orders from above to stop talking to writers. Setting up the meeting had been easy enough, though. That she’d accepted my request for a meeting meant one of two things: she was either going to hew closely to talking points, or cancel the interview once she thought more about it. But she hadn’t canceled the interview. So I’m prepared for her to hide behind a veil of denial, which would not only be easy but perfectly logical, given everything.

  Before arriving this afternoon, I learned that Herrmann and her husband come from, of all places, DeKalb County, Illinois. They still own six hundred acres of corn and soybeans back home, and fifty windmills spin shadows adjacent to their property. I find myself marveling at serendipitous connections, at life’s unexpected symmetry, even amid its tendency to tip toward disorder. Herrmann taught chemistry for a while, became an assistant principal, and then was a principal at a high school in Middleton, Wisconsin, for close to eight years before Gunn High hired her.

  Coming to gather me in the waiting area, Herrmann approaches with an open expression, eyes swimming in warmth. She’s apologizing to me for starting our meeting a little bit late; her meeting with the assistant superintendent ran long. I hadn’t noticed the time. It’s been an unexpectedly busy day around here, she continues, but she’s glad that we can find some space to talk.

  She points me to a table in her personal office, and as I take a seat I look around a room that’s big and clean. I get the sense that she hasn’t quite finished moving into this space, even though she’s occupied it since the school recruited her back in 2014. “Did you know about Gunn High’s story?” I ask.

  “A little,” she says. The school didn’t keep its troubling history a secret from her. But at the time there hadn’t been an incident at Gunn High in more than four years. Driving around with a real estate agent, looking for homes to rent, she noticed the track monitors at the railroad crossings. Above their sun tarps hung a simple white-on-black sign with the number for the national suicide prevention hotline, and another warning pedestrians to stay away from the crossing. In rural Illinois, Herrmann grew up around trains, but she’d never seen any safety measures like those here. “That’s when I started to get an idea of what this place had
gone through.” Eight weeks into her first year at Gunn High, when a train struck and killed the student Quinn Gens, Herrmann says the pretense of distance—both in terms of the safety that time creates between problems of the past and today, as well as her own arm’s-length association with the story of Palo Alto—dematerialized.

  Now she was in charge of dusting off the old machinery from the era of 2009 and 2010, the array of countermeasures and proactive risk reduction methods. Herrmann reactivated partnerships that the school district established with Stanford University, mental health agencies, and the county. There were days when Herrmann hosted more than twenty different mental health providers on the campus at a time. The components of the prevention system worked together smoothly. Gunn High had become tragically efficient at responding to calamity.

  As the second cluster persisted through 2015, the psychological, behavioral, and emotional social contagions swirled and interacted with one another in this microcosm. More than any other social contagion, Herrmann saw the effects of fear spread. “There was a lot of fear from students that, if it could happen to a person who seemed so happy and positive, maybe it could happen to them, too. That same fear spread among parents, about what may or may not be contributing to student health and well-being, and feelings of stress, and not feeling they could manage that for their child. The staff worried that students were dying because they were assigning too much homework, or that they didn’t have good relationships with these kids.”

  But eventually, Herrmann noticed the story of social contagions changing from one of fear and hysteria to a story of community. There is now, more than ever, she tells me, a catchable sense that everyone is in this together. For six years Palo Alto has questioned what’s wrong with its community. But what if the community is, in fact, a major reason why we’ve been able to combat the two strange contagions in the first place? We cannot determine the effect of a strange contagion without identifying the parameters of the community that contains it. The hot zone is not a person but a location on a map. Without borders, social contagions defy categorization. A cluster is so defined by behaviors that fall within an accelerated time frame and a geographical area. When a social contagion jumps its boundaries, be it those of a work group, a classroom, or an entire town, these parameters are the measures by which we define the leap. Communities are the vessels that contain social contagions, and the vessels that social contagions escape from.