Strange Contagion

by Lee Daniel Kravetz

  But community is also the closest thing we have to a viable treatment. Community answers social contagions with well-informed rational discourse over overblown rejoinders. Community primes people for bravery and grounds them against irrational fear. A community attuned to the telltale signs of its emotions will respond to even the most subtle of warning signs. And, in the end, communities will choose to leverage social contagions or fall victim to them.

  When they strike, a community’s effort to defend itself defines the narrative of the strange contagion. Each must ask: Will this be a story of irrational fear, hysteria, greed, burnout, and unrestrained anger? Or will this be a story of hope, rationality, bravery, and unification?

  Herrmann questions what to do with a population that has suffered as greatly as this town. As a transmitter of information, resources, and knowledge, the community’s fighting populace remains on the front lines of the battle against student suicide. We’ve positioned ourselves on committees, developed systems to offer outreach, and created programs to take care of the grieving, to monitor kids, and to graft emotional intelligence onto their psyches. Yes, Herrmann has seen social contagions do their damage, but she’s also discovered a community that’s learned to leverage them to its advantage.

  “We’ve had some luck spreading bravery. Once we experienced loss, there was a great external force to do things differently, to take responsibility. If we were gonna do this, we were gonna have the courage to listen and to visit problems,” she says. Courage trickled down from teachers to students, from students to parents, from parents to kids. “I’ve watched that courage spread. Kids are taking on the mentality of mandated reporters. Peers who know that a friend is in a bad space, but were once reluctant to tell an adult because they feared that it would be jeopardizing a friendship, now know firsthand that worse things can happen from not helping them get help. That takes a lot of courage, and we’re seeing it more frequently. Our students are more vocal than they ever were before. They want to be active participants in school-wide decisions and push for even stronger voices than we’ve had in the past.”

  These social contagions, she says, aren’t simply mixing and interacting within the community to be used as helping tools or weapons against the problem. This perfect storm of social phenomena is the community. My neighbor, Sanjeet Thadani, said that at some point the interlopers become part of the fabric of a place, contributing the social contagions simply by virtue of being here. The same is also true for social contagions, interlopers that take over a place to the point that the two are indistinguishable from each other.

  Taking a wide view of the past six years, I believe that Herrmann is right. This town is circumscribed by the social contagions it harbors, by the dangerous and the destructive outcomes, as well as by the benign and the beneficial consequences. This is our strange contagion, and our strange contagion defines this place.

  Herrmann shares her perspective with me about the ways in which the school’s focus has shifted over her two years here to bring awareness of social contagions to the forefront. We talk about the importance of being deliberate in what we say and do, given how catchable thoughts, behaviors, and emotions are, and how Gunn High has worked hard to spark a positive mood, courage, and a cohesive sense of school pride. She’s approved the formation of a student wellness committee that recently launched a campaign to reduce stigma around help-seeking activities. She tells me about Gunn High’s efforts to work in tandem with families to support their students through emotional crises. In that time, a year has come and gone without the death of another Gunn High student, statistics that seem to justify the employment of such tremendous efforts. Meanwhile, time has healed the community as best it can.

  When the phone rings, Herrmann glances across the room at her desk and decides to let it go to voice mail. The interview continues for a couple of minutes, but the phone rings again. Herrmann gets up to check the incoming number. “It’s the superintendent’s office,” she says. She takes the call and turns her back to me.

  When she finishes the conversation, she returns to the table and, fearing she’s coming across as a bit distracted this afternoon, apologizes to me again. If I was ever at all concerned Herrmann might be guarded during our meeting today, all worry has long since vanished. She continues to come across as open, honest, and disarmingly unguarded.

  “You’ve probably noticed a lot of things going on around here,” she continues.

  It’s only as she mentions it that the innocuous details of the day unexpectedly begin to tilt a little in my mind. The overcrowded parking lot becomes a sign of urgency. And the chair massage specialists I observed setting up stations like an amenity at a start-up appear less like a Silicon Valley–style perk and more like something jarringly out of place. The main office was so busy that the assistant to the principal neglected to issue me a parking permit when I signed in, a highly unusual oversight.

  Herrmann draws in a long sip from her water bottle. “It’s going to be reported, so I guess I can share it with you.”

  Her voice is thin. I catch a quiver in her face. After a moment I realize the air has stalled in my lungs. The moment arrives with the force of sudden ice-water immersion; cold shock grasps at my body and I gasp even as Herrmann’s gaze softens. The county coroner conveyed the news to her that responders recovered the body of a nineteen-year-old Gunn High alum named Sarah Marie Longyear. She was struck by the northbound number 155 train.

  Chapter 29

  A Plague of Yellow Jacks

  “This interview, everything we’re talking about, is real right now.”

  I don’t know quite what to say to her. My mouth is dry. I lean away from Herrmann and slide my hands along the table between us.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  The words sound flat and insincere. I want to turn off the digital voice recorder under my fingers. She says we should continue the interview.

  “Throughout this whole school year we’ve been working really hard to find that balance between remembering and honoring what’s happened, but trying to move past it and focus on all of the great things that are also happening at Gunn High,” she says. She tries to remind herself every day that these students only have four years here, and she wants those years to be good for them. Last year the school had a lot of tragedy. This year they strived to make it a positive and special experience for the students. “And we succeeded at that for a really long time.”

  “Can I ask how you’re doing?”

  Herrmann exhales slowly. A little tremor flutters through this simple action. I’m sitting here helpless to do anything. She is peering back at me, looking into me clearly, without reservation, hard and cool.

  “This shouldn’t be something that we’ve done so many times that we’re good at it. It feels unhealthy. I think that’s the thing that’s stuck with me the most, just knowing that for me this is the fourth Gunn student who’s died under my principalship, but for many of my staff it’s their ninth in the last six years. That’s what I’m really feeling. We’re going back into autopilot.”

  The school and the town are good at dealing with this. Denise Herrmann and I know what will happen next. The local high schools will be calling assemblies. Grief support programs will deploy their prevention tool kits, with scripts to read to the media, public service announcements, and crisis plans. In the days and weeks to come, we will repeat a familiar cycle of responses as one applies an ointment to an open wound. We will come at this the way we always do, using our treatment models and wanting so desperately to make things better. The mind-set is always the same. The strange contagion must stop and therefore it’s going to stop. But, sitting in Herrmann’s office, still reeling from the news, I’m unsure if it ever will.

  We have the means to address elements of the strange contagion, but we still have no tangible way to fully stop it. Six years have passed since I first set out to uncover the components of this perfect storm with the hope that in doing so we might learn how to end it. Wh
at I’m left with is a series of insights and contradictions: Media limits dispersion but also perpetuates it. Emotional intelligence counters the effects of emotional contagions even while it does little to stop their spread. Behavioral primes foster bravery and yet they also promote impossible standards. Support groups slow contagions but they also spread them. Responding to hysteria reduces contamination but it also increases it. Cuing people to catch positive behaviors can backfire and trigger our innate propensity for self-harm. The search for a surefire cure, that most vital of grails, only brings me back to Palo Alto empty-handed.

  When the strange contagion began and I first spoke with Nicholas Christakis, my question to him was a simple one: Is it possible to cultivate a cure to Palo Alto’s strange contagion? Throughout my search, I’ve been operating under the assumption that there is the potential for a remedy, but I may have had the wrong goal all along. In the end, maybe containing the suicide cluster wasn’t the right objective. The question I should have been asking him, and myself, was: What are we going to do about it now that it’s here and part of the fabric of our reality?

  The best we can do, I suppose, is to treat it as we would any other illness. Harmful and helpful social contagions exist everywhere. There’s really no avoiding them. We have ways to address the ones that create negative consequences and promote the ones that produce positive consequences. But in terms of finding that single thing that’s going to finish this strange contagion for good, the fact is the underlying social contagions and regional vulnerabilities will persist. As one does during an outbreak of a virulent disease, we treat the symptoms, avoid the triggers, and maintain unyielding vigilance. And we are left to support one another through our sickness and grief in a way that yields goodness.

  It’s not going to stop. The six-year search has amounted to this intolerable fact.

  Of course, this really shouldn’t surprise me. Every person I’ve visited and each scenario I’ve met over the years has implicitly imparted such wisdom. Gerald Russell spoke of entropy, one’s inability to put back what has since escaped. Kern County harbors uncertainty and irrational fear to this day, despite fully trusting the undeniable facts that otherwise discount regional hysteria. Wael Ghonim, in his story of post-revolution Egypt, referred to it as the inevitable decline into old behaviors. When I asked Gary Slutkin at the University of Illinois if he believed that violence is truly curable, he responded carefully. “Well, with diseases, rather than make pronouncements of cure, we talk about them in terms of the likelihood of relapse. There’s no real reason why we shouldn’t be able to stop a social contagion the same way we stop other infectious processes like smallpox, polio, tuberculosis, leprosy, or plague when the right strategies are put into place within the right infrastructures.” But he didn’t really answer my question, and I realize now, as the strange contagion claims another life, that it is in this absence where his true answer remains.

  With contagious illnesses, both physical and psychological, eradication requires some combination of exposure and resistance. The math of infectious processes is the math of transmission and the susceptibility of a community. “Once a contagion starts to propagate,” Slutkin told me, “stopping it is a matter of bending the curve enough that fewer people are exposed to it. Then you have resistance. But never eradication.”

  The answers I’ve found on this search have pointed to the hard reality of something pervasive and unyielding and incurable. I’ve come away with a clear understanding as to the sources feeding a big problem: the pathogens of cultural influence, frenzies, hysteria, a nocebo effect, ambition, and greed; of goal contagions; of elevated thresholds of acceptance; of stress and depression; of the dangers of conformity and pressure. But within these answers I’m beginning to see a common thread. I notice that every resource I’ve visited and response I’ve collected speaks to our responsibility to one another as individual members of a collective. The teacher Roni Habib and the writer Julie Lythcott-Haims both spoke of applying emotional awareness to the community, the way that each of us must watch out for one another, especially when we do not have the language to express our pain. Gary Slutkin at Cure Violence took this further. When all members of the community—from taxi drivers to baristas—become knowledgeable interrupters of problematic social contagions, watching for signs and knowing the resources available to them, only good things can happen. Peter Gollwitzer at the Motivation Lab spoke of changing primes in the community, of teaching people to become mindful of the cues we inadvertently parade and how each can affect moods and behaviors of others around us. Sanjeet Thadani, my neighbor, spoke of modifying the character of the community’s collective intelligence and the remarkable changes one can expect when we alter what we teach our children. At PCI Media Impact, Sean Southey spoke of relying on the community to spread curative memes and behaviors through story. Without a responsive community, the message becomes lost, the positive change rendered inert.

  In the beginning of my investigation, I found myself in the middle of two strange contagion events, and I’ve come away now with a more holistic understanding of the necessity of individuals to care for one another, to watch out for one another, to take on an awareness of what it is we are capable of communicating as well as our powers of influence. Somewhere along the way my purpose became one of trying to understand how the community can best face its crisis and sustain itself amid the natural phenomena of social contagions, which are as inevitable and untamable as a cyclone.

  Herrmann accompanies me out of her office. From the outside looking in, Gunn High might as well be any high school in the country today. You’d never know what’s transpired here. But then you look closer—it practically invites you to—and details come into focus. Together, Herrmann and I walk past the Bat Cave, inset with long picnic tables, orange patterns of brick, and a sign on a post with a large black arrow pointed to the sky. It’s there reminding students to keep their heads up. On another building, someone has tacked up a hand-drawn sign that reads we care. Along the side of a classroom is a wall reserved for personal rejection letters from universities, a reminder that failure is not the exception. In other locations around campus there hang signs with phone numbers to suicide and crisis centers.

  Herrmann smiles at me, an act of courage more eloquent, comforting, and tender than any I have found at Gunn High during these past six years. “Our students are amazingly resilient, strong, caring, everyday kids,” she says. Today they look one another in the eyes, Herrmann tells me. When they ask how you’re doing, this is not some empty pleasantry but a penetrating, deeply meaningful exchange. In one another they monitor for vocal inflections, sloping affect, the dulling of light in other people’s faces. And if they see a sign they recognize and it sets off in them something electric and awful, they will sound the warning. They prime courage in one another, as well as hope and resilience.

  My focus momentarily shifts to a point just beyond Herrmann’s shoulder. In the center of one of the courtyards rises the school’s flagpole. The white and red California state flag, emblazoned with a brown bear on a green grass plat, moves in the breeze.

  Maybe it’s time to add another flag to it, I think. A bright yellow flag, a yellow jack, a visual reminder of the psychological, emotional, and the behavioral contagions we all spread and contract and resist. Perhaps we should all raise yellow jacks. They’d ride atop of office cubicles, cars, mall entrances, coffee shops, crowded movie theaters, and the entrances of crammed subway terminals and bus stations. The color guard would protect the yellow jack, not out of a sense of militaristic honor, but out of personal duty and responsibility to others who make up the collective regiments. From office parks to community parks across the planet, they’d wash cities in number-two-pencil yellow, flags effortlessly blowing past boundaries of all designation, in line with endemic anxiety, odious behaviors, the corruption of rational thinking, but no more or less than laughter, happiness, courage, the flash of mirror neurons that align heart rates, the transmissible weal
th of knowledge, and, above all else, the infection of hope. I picture them all, and I feel comforted by a sense of connection to the world.

  In the coming months my family and I will leave the community of Palo Alto for good. We’ll dismantle the apartment. Haul our moving boxes from the storage room and fill them with our things. Wrap packing paper over our dishes, fold our clothes, take down the art from the walls. We won’t have to go far to leave Silicon Valley; we’ll move into a house twenty miles north. Unlike our old community, mostly made up of technology industry professionals, our new neighborhood, somewhat off the grid, will be more of a hodgepodge of aging hippies, teachers, social workers, blue-collar folks, and retired military. Instead of Stanford University, we’ll have a community college and a boys’ reformatory down the hill. We’ll swap boutique markets for a Safeway with linoleum the color of day-old orange rinds. Instead of start-ups, we’ll have a mini-mall and two gas stations. My wife will resign from Google and join a nonprofit organization, which friends will regard as financially foolish. Our choice to leave will be based, in part, on an irrational fear that we’ll dress in reasons of practicality. But let’s be clear, we’ve bought into the hysteria. The fear. The “just in case.”