The Vancouver Sun - September 2000

Next Wednesday Josh Platzer should have celebrated his 17th birthday.
Instead, September 20 marks the day many of Josh's friends, neighbours and teachers will gather in his old school's gym to watch a powerful dance drama called ICE: beyond cool.

Staged by DanceArts Vancouver as an "open dress rehearsal" for their eight-city national tour that begins the following week, the piece is
built on a theme Josh's friends may find too close for comfort. But then comfort is not what ICE is about. It's about teen suicide, and this particular performance is being dedicated to the memory of the Point Grey Secondary student who took his life just over a year ago.

That it is taking place on his birthday is serendipitous, or at least that's how his parents Jude and Ben Platzer bravely try to think of it. It was Jude's idea to bring ICE to the high school as a way to promote
healthy dialogue on a topic too often avoided. In fact, she believes Josh might have celebrated his 17th, and many more birthdays, if channels of communication between teens and adults, health providers and counsellors, teachers and parents were more open when Josh was alive.

I wrote briefly about Josh last week, in a follow-up to a column about
problems some local parents have had using the 911 line to find their
missing children. Jude then invited me to come for tea in her cozy
Kerrisdale home, and talk about a bigger issue - the problem our whole
society has finding the words and will to confront the twin plagues of
depression and suicide, which all too often turn missing kids into tragic
statistics.

In Canada, suicide is the second leading cause of death for 15 to 19 year olds, after car crashes. A 1996 Alberta study of 15 to 24 year olds found that 17 per cent of injuries resulting in hospitalization were self inflicted.

According to the Canadian Mental Health Association, the suicide rate has almost quadrupled in the past generation. Teenage boys are approximately three times more likely to commit suicide; in at least half of all cases there is a link with depression.

In Josh's case, depression had been diagnosed in his 16th year, and
medications prescribed. But the bright, popular boy resisted taking the
pills and his parents were at a loss to monitor him. They did not get the support they needed from health providers, says Jude whose anger is still palpable. The doctor who prescribed anti-depressants did not inform the Platzers, opting to protect Josh's confidentiality and later explaining that this is sometimes necessary when developing rapport with a troubled teen. Other doctors became involved, but the common message received by Jude, a registered nurse, was that she should "back off" and give Josh space.

"That would have been fine, if someone was closely monitoring him. But who is supposed to do that, if not a parent?" she says. "It was like a conspiracy of silence - the teachers, the school counsellors, the people who saw him miss countless classes while he sat in the hall writing in his 'suicide diary'. and his friends, who got so used to hearing him talk about death that they would joke with him about what kind of funeral he wanted - and no one told us. And he fell through the cracks."

Together the Platzers might have struggled through this rough period, says Jude who also had a difficult time in her own adolescence. Instead, Josh embraced "a permanent solution to a temporary problem."

She turned her energy to raising funds for support of troubled teens and their parents - she and her husband have set up the Josh Platzer Memorial Fund through the Vancouver Foundation - and to getting the message out: that commication can save lives. Having read about ICE, she contacted Vancouver DanceArts artistic director Judith Marcuse and Point Grey's vice principal Walter Mustapich and the three met at the school's gym last spring. Marcuse's intitial response was mixed: "I wanted to do it, but this needs a large open space. A gymnasium presents enormous logistical challenges. The lighting trusses won't even fit in. But Jude was persuasive."

The piece is designed to be performed in arenas or the atrium of shopping centres (after hours). It debuted at Pacific Centre three years ago, to critical acclaim, and will appear in similar venues in the weeks ahead as the tour wends its way from Ottawa Sept. 27 to Prince George, Nov. 6. Five performances are scheduled Oct. 25 through 28 at Vancouver's International Village on False Creek.

"I told Jude that September 20 was the only date that would work for an open rehearsal at Point Grey," recalls Marcuse, "and she blanched. Of course that is Josh's birthday. It gives the performance even more
weight."

ICE: beyond cool is a kind of day-in-the-fragile-life story of a young
woman. It is based on three years of workshops Marcuse conducted in
Vancouver with more than 250 teenagers. The script is by playwright John Lazarus, choreography by Judith Marcuse and music by Graeme Coleman. The director is Jane Heyman, head of Langara's Studio 58 theatre program, a number of whose students appear in the 15-member cast.

Integral to the performance is a talkback session at the end, where
audience members are encouraged to respond. "Older people are sometimes quite shocked by what they've seen and heard," says Marcuse. "Younger people are energized."

She describes a typical exchange: "What can we do?" asks a parent. "Here's what," offers a teenager, grabbing the microphone and detailing the myriad stresses, fears, temptations, pressures to be "cool," and the urgent need for all that dangerous energy to find safe release.

Marcuse has set the therapeutic stage in each city by bringing health providers, educators and support groups into the performance venues to provide direction to audience members. An information brochure and local resource lists are handed out.

"Suicide is not talked about. Mental illness is not talked about," says
Marcuse whose two-year uphill battle to raise funds for this tour was
almost lost to the stigma of having one's name attached to such themes. Though she earned support from governments and charitable foundations, not one corporate sponsor agreed to back ICE - none of the retailers who
clothe the kids, no one from the cosmetics or sporting goods or music industries whose fortunes turn on those who are young and all too often desperate to be cool.

For more information on the DanceArts tour, call (toll free) 877-ICE-9111
or visit the website at www.dancearts.bc.ca. On the Josh Platzer Memorial Fund: 688-2204. The Point Grey performance is by invitational to the school community only.