Adam Reule's classmates in Cottage Grove, Minnesota, wanted to include a full-page memorial in their 1998 yearbook dedicated to him and another student who had died before their graduation. Friends of Annette Sander and Jennifer Powell of Victorville, California, wanted to remember their deaths in 1995 by planting trees on the campus of the high school the two girls attended. Across the country, memorial gestures like these are controversial because they are dedicated to teens who died by committing suicide.

Memorials to suicide victims make some parents, school administrators, teachers, suicidologists, and others uneasy because they fear that memorializing suicide victims will promote suicide contagion, the potential that some teens may be influenced to commit suicide by someone else's suicidal behavior. For example, according to many of those who work with teens at risk, teens who feel unloved and unappreciated see suicide victims receiving massive amounts of attention through memorials...