When he wasn’t on the field, he sat on the couch watching his beloved New England Patriots on TV, his father Jay told CNN.
“Every time the football season ended, he was on a high, win or lose,” he said.
“He focused on building his muscles,” Smith said, adding that his son was on a special diet and bought all the equipment he could, in addition to cycling and jogging.
‘He got an old car tire … tied a rope around it and cut open a backpack. All neighbors would see him dragging across the lawn. He raked the lawn with that tire almost all summer long. It was full of grass. “
But as the pandemic continued and the school first announced a scaled back football season and then a switch to flag football, Smith said Spencer was starting to worry. After all, he was a tackler, not a runner.
He eventually left the team. He stopped exercising and started taking more naps. Spencer, previously an honor roll student, also struggled with distance learning.
Looking back, Spencer’s father said there were signs that he greatly missed his teammates and the Thursday night barbecues and spaghetti dinners.
But nothing could have prepared him for that December morning.
Jay Smith got a text from his wife saying Spencer had overslept again as he missed the homeroom. He went to his son’s bedroom. He was dead by suicide.
‘I just asked,’ Spencer, why? Said his father.
Disablements that coincide with ER visits
A growing number of families resemble the Smiths – they lose a child to suicide during the pandemic.
The rate of youth suicides generally rose before the pandemic, and it’s too early to directly link an increase in deaths to school closures, said Katrina Rufino, associate professor of psychology at the University of Houston.
But she co-authored a study that found that the number of emergency room visits to a children’s hospital in Houston related to mental health had increased significantly since the coronavirus hit the US.
In Houston, the increase in teens with suicidal thoughts and self-harm coincided with cessation related to the pandemic, including school closures, Rufino and colleagues wrote in the paper published in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
“Our analysis found that there were significantly more suicidal thoughts in March and July 2020 – that’s when you really saw the effects here in Houston,” Rufino said of the study, which looked at the uptake of emergency care in the Texas Children’s Hospital for young people aged 11 to 21.
“March was when things first hit, things started to stop. Here in Houston, we closed the rodeo, went home from schools after spring break. And then in July we really started to see our wave here in Houston. “
Heartbreaking deaths
There are concerns about student mental health across the country. In Nevada, the Clark County school district, the fifth largest in the country, including Las Vegas, has been particularly badly affected.
The youngest child to die was only nine years old.
Superintendent Jesus Jara says he feels the losses personally.
“It’s heartbreaking as a superintendent when you lose a child. It’s heartbreaking as a leader,” he said.
Jara said some kids struggle with not eating enough. For some, their parents may have lost their jobs or the children may have to take on new responsibilities when the schools are no longer there.
Signs of trouble began in the early fall when an alert system on school-issued laptops and tablets programmed to detect mental and emotional problems showed an increase in alarming searches.
‘Children google’ how to commit suicide ‘. You get the warnings – you get four or five a day, ”Jara said.
The Clark County school board is now supporting a plan to resume personal teaching to elementary students starting in March, which is welcome news for Jara.
“My teachers work really hard, but it’s that personal interaction. You can’t take a loud lunchroom for granted,” he said.
Personal schools help students grieve together
Personal schools can also help prevent more students from feeling overwhelmed after the loss of a classmate – a process Rufino of the University of Houston calls “postvention” that she believes is critical in conjunction with prevention measures.
“When it comes to suicide among young people, you really have to worry about things like suicide contamination or suicide clusters, because they are quite common among young people,” she told CNN. “If there is a youth suicide, a school will quickly implement a ‘post-vention’ plan. It will provide much-needed support for students and teachers,” she said, adding that they could cope with the tragic loss together.
“However, if there are no schools on campus, it will be very difficult to implement some sort of postvention plan. And it is possible that it will make parents doubt, not sure how to talk to their children.”
Spencer Smith’s parents believe that if schools and youth programs had been open with proper social distance so that children could be together safely, he might not have died.
They urge other families not to take face-to-face interaction for granted.
“Check them every morning, every night, no matter how old they are, when they get home,” said Jay Smith. Always give them a hug, tell them how proud you are of them. I remember always telling Spencer that. I think I should have told him more. ‘