Winona Reif
The most honest piece of journalism about youth mental health I’ve read wasn’t written by a journalist.
Summer Devi Mehta was a girl whose family shared space with mine. When thinking of her, I remember someone who loved Minecraft and hip-hop, and had a dream of living in New York City, a dream that felt less like a wish and more like an eventual certainty. On Feb. 3, she died by suicide at 16-years-old. In her own words, she named why: Summer was a trans girl, and this was central to her death. In the days that followed, her family shared her story and asked strangers for $1 million dollars to donate to the Trevor Project, the leading suicide prevention organization for LGBTQ+ youth, a community that attempts suicide at nearly four times the rate of their peers. It was Summer’s final wish.
But when the news broke, her humanity started to leak out of the story. The Palo Alto Daily Post’s first update — published the same day she died — didn’t name her until two days after she passed. But even with the two extra days, the most human detail the paper could offer was that she acted in plays, sourced not from anyone who loved her but from a casting website. The rest was about train delays, rubber cones and infrastructure statistics.
From a journalistic perspective, I understand this. When I covered suicide policy for The Outlook six months ago, I was handed a thick stack of guidelines to avoid “contagion” and “bias” — rules designed to protect the vulnerable, written with the best of intentions. But when a publication strips out the humanity of a story, it doesn’t just fail the person being covered but the reader, too. You cannot form an opinion about something you cannot feel. You cannot act on something you have already scrolled past.
And there is a haunting irony in the fact that, in her final moments of feeling powerless, Summer performed a profound act of agency. It is a staggering indictment of our social systems that a young person might feel they can only truly own their story by choosing how it ends. But the institution that exists to amplify exactly that kind of story looked away. Her family had to instead.
And we are not much better. We are already marinated in catastrophe. We watched the Epstein files drop with clear names, dates and images, expecting a reckoning, only for the news cycle to simply turn the page. We see headlines about immigration enforcement raids — unconstitutional, family-separating, life-upending. Repost a “Know Your Rights” infographic for twenty-four hours, and call it solidarity. But reposting is the performance of caring: it costs nothing, changes nothing and lets us feel like we did something without having to sit with the discomfort of actually doing something. When you are shown everything simultaneously — climate change, immigration, gun laws — but are given virtually no power to affect any of it, your empathy muscle withers, and then atrophies.
We adopt this mask of indifference because vulnerability feels like a waste of social capital. It’s easier to repost a slide deck or leave someone on delivered than it is to have an intimate, difficult conversation. We are told we are the “leaders of tomorrow” — as if tomorrow excuses the fact that today, our voices don’t count, our votes don’t exist and our outrage is only useful as an aesthetic. We are handed the weight of the world’s problems, but denied a lever to move it.
Yet, the floor occasionally shifts. The algorithm that usually numbs us was, for a moment, repurposed to organize us; the same tool that built our indifference became the one that built the recent district walkout. Students proved it is possible to hijack the shallow breadth of social media and force it into the depth of a movement.
The change has to start with how we tell our stories. For publications, the mandate is clear: resist clinical distance. Stop treating human beings as “events.” Give us the Minecraft, the hip-hop and the NYC dreams, the details that make a person irreducible to a headline. A publication’s job is not to dump information into a void. It is to give the reader a reason to care, and then a path to do something about it. If a publication’s reporting doesn’t evoke a visceral reaction when covering the fourth suicide in Palo Alto Union School District in two years, it isn’t considered objective. It’s irrelevant.
And for us, the students, the challenge is to trade breadth for depth. That means something specific: put down the slide deck, text the friend you’ve been avoiding, have the conversation you’ve been scared to start. One deep, difficult, and messy conversation with a peer about the fear we all feel is worth a thousand Instagram slides. Yes, caring is risky. Yes, you might speak up and nothing might change. But the alternative is a slow, cold desensitization that leaves us as hollowed as the headlines we scroll past.
The fundraiser for Summer is a $1 million ultimatum delivered to our collective empathy. Her family gave readers a person and dared them to look away. Summer’s final wish was that her death would make the world kinder. Whether it does depends entirely on whether we let her become another story we learned to scroll past — again — or whether we finally decide that some stories demand more from us than that.
