Teen Suicide: Not Even 15, And There's Nothing To Live For

POLLOCK PINES, Calif. - His parents had no idea Ben Bratt had carved "kill" and other words into his body until they saw the scabbed letters on his arms and chest as he lay brain dead in a hospital bed.

The 13-year-old had, in fact, given only one hint of his plan to kill himself - to his bewildered 7-year-old stepbrother.

"Bunk bed, cord, neck," Ben said to the boy shortly before Valentine's Day, the day he looped guitar amplifier cord around his neck and hanged himself from his bed at his mother's house.

His was the second suicide of its kind in a two-week period in El Dorado County, in the Sierra foothills between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe. On Jan. 28, Ben's 14-year-old friend, Chad Stuart, hanged himself from a tree not far from his home in nearby Cameron Park.

From a statistical standpoint, the boys fit what some experts call an alarming national trend. The increase in suicide among 10-to 14-year-olds - an age range that didn't even used to be tracked for lack of numbers - has been "dramatic" since the early 1980s, says Lloyd Potter, a lead scientist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Rate is high in U.S.

A CDC report released in February showed that, in a survey of the largest 25 industrialized countries, the U.S. rate of suicide for children 14 and younger was double that of the other 24 countries combined. In terms of firearms suicides, the rate was 10 times greater, Potter says.

But hard numbers don't necessarily explain what went wrong for Ben and Chad and for the hundreds of other young people who kill themselves each year in the United States.

"Ben was so independent and stable that I'd never doubted him," says his father, Barry Bratt.

But that changed last summer, about the same time Ben turned 13 and entered the eighth grade, his father says.

Once an honors student with a talent for drawing and the guitar, the brooding teen was failing at school for the first time. He ran away from home, one time hiding out for two days in a friend's back yard.

His parents, who divorced when he was a baby, are also certain he was smoking cigarettes and experimenting with alcohol and drugs.

In November, Barry Bratt moved his son from Cameron Park to Pollock Pines to live with his mother and stepfather.

"I wanted him to have a second chance," says his father, a third-grade teacher.

His mother, Terri O'Neal, says she was frantic to find help for her son, the eldest of her three children. She took him to a therapist, and drove him on weekends to see the friends he desperately missed.

A psychologist at his new school warned that Ben had scored 38 out of 40 on a test for suicidal tendencies.

All the while, the music Ben listened to became disturbingly darker, including that of shock rocker Marilyn Manson, whose lyrics sometimes refer to suicide and self-mutilation.

"I've looked ahead and saw a world that's dead. I guess that I am, too," Manson hisses on his album "Antichrist Superstar," the one gift Ben asked for last Christmas. "I'm on my way down now. I'd like to take you with me."

Ben's taste in music marked a dramatic change for a boy who, until he was about 10, refused to sleep or travel without a Cabbage Patch doll named Petey.

"It's a combination of so many things," his father says. "You assume you know your child. But I found out that I didn't know him very well.

"I failed him. I know I did. But I also know that, when he listened to the music, he was a different kid."

Dave Stevenson agrees. He's a deputy sheriff who investigated the case for the El Dorado County Sheriff's Department.

"Anytime that you take an impressionable youth who's going through puberty, going through depression - that coupled with poor grades and experimenting with drugs and alcohol - I think it does play a part," Stevenson says.

Youths cite reasons

A survey of Oregon teens who'd attempted suicide from 1988 to 1993, for example, named three top reasons, the CDC's Potter says: family discord, problems with a boyfriend or girlfriend and school troubles.

But the word that experts use over and over again to describe the mood of suicidal youth is "hopeless."

Younger teens, says Dr. Barbara Staggers, are also more likely to make rash decisions about suicide, based on the emotion of the day.

"It's not just the `bad kids.' It's the good kids who are saying, `Well, screw it. There's nothing in it for me,' " says Staggers, director of adolescent medicine at Children's Hospital in Oakland, Calif.

Experts also say there is very little money being spent on suicide prevention, in part because of a "societal queasiness," as one state official calls it, over talking about suicide.

There are a few states where that's not true, Potter says. This year, for example, Washington state, which has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the country, is launching one of the nation's best-funded teen-suicide-prevention programs. It will attempt to train everyone from teachers and students to health officials and parents.

By comparison, California's departments of mental health and education have continually cut funding for youth-suicide prevention since 1994, handing the bulk of the responsibility to the counties.

"The field is very poorly developed," Potter says.

In his suicide note, Ben - who had taped a flier from Chad's memorial service to his bedroom wall - made vague references to joining his friends and having others follow after him.

He also left a sarcastic message that continues to pain his grieving parents.

"I know some of you will miss me," Ben wrote. "Ha ha ha."