Recognizing Symptoms of Teen Suicide

Jan. 7 -- What drove 15-year-old Charles Bishop to crash a plane into a Florida high-rise may never be known, but experts say there's much that can be learned about his likely state of mind, and those insights may shed light on the broader problems of teen violence and suicide.

Bishop died Saturday when he slammed a stolen airplane into an office building in downtown Tampa. A suicide note he left behind expressed sympathy for Osama bin Laden, law enforcement officials said.

Police have called Bishop a troubled young man, but one of his teachers, Gabriella Terry, described him as "very sociable, very active in class."

Dr. David Shaffer, a child psychiatrist at Columbia University in New York, believes it may be possible to diagnose any problems Bishop had.

"You can patch together the kind of psychiatric diagnosis the kid had, usually without any difficulty," said Shaffer. "What you normally do, in the case of a 15-year-old, is you interview both parents separately, and you would also interview some teenagers — either a sibling or a friend who knew them well — and you would ask in a lot of detail about individual symptoms."

Shaffer refers to this technique as a psychological autopsy, or a way to piece together the clues to a person's psyche after his death.

"The context of the way he killed himself had to do with what was going on in the news. So in a way it's a little bit of a copycat," said Elaine Leader, a psychotherapist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Identifying the Symptoms

Many experts believe the problem of teen suicide stems from mood disorders, such as depression.

"Two-thirds of the kids who commit suicide have a mood disorder, primarily bipolar disorder or depression," said Dr. Eric Benjamin, a child psychiatrist at Phoenix Children's Hospital in Arizona.

"There is that quiet small group of 10 to 20 percent of kids who everybody thought was a perfect student; they were quiet; they never said anything. A lot of these kids will get obsessed with perceived role models or heroes, and start living in their own world," he said.