Most teens deal with adolescent angst and emerge as healthy young men and women.

But some don’t.

Suicide is the third leading killer of youth between the ages of 15-24.

Warning signs of depression and suicide often are attributed to normal teenage behavior — making it difficult for parents and teachers to respond to youth in crisis. In addition, some question whether schools should play any role in providing mental health services for troubled students.

The Sentinel takes a look at these sensitive issues in a four-part series that starts today with the story of Dottie Wormser’s struggle to lead a normal life in the wake of her son Mark’s Nov. 14, 2000 decision to take his own life.

Graduation — the right of passage to adulthood. In this case, Cumberland Valley High School, Class of 2004.

This should have been the happiest night of their young lives. Instead, it was filled with moments of crushing sadness.

The class was short two members— two outwardly happy, healthy young men who each seemed destined to accomplish great things and change lives.

But they chose death instead.

Mark Wormser, 15, of Hampden Township, was in therapy when he took his life in 9th grade. The product of an otherwise happy home, he began cutting himself during the summer of 2000 and quickly descended into a personal hell culminating with his death at home on Nov. 15.

Fast forward three-and-a-half years. Tragedy again touched the lives of classmates when popular senior Corey Bischof, 18, disappeared and was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in May 2004. Starting quarterback for the wildly successful CV Eagles football team, Bischof’s death stunned the entire community.

Family members and friends of both teenagers were left to grapple with the obvious question: why?

“You take it very personally that the love I had for Mark wasn’t enough to keep him going,” says Dottie Wormser, Mark’s mother. “I have to remind myself that Mark just couldn’t see past his problems.”

A piece of Dottie Wormser died with her son. Her road to peace and recovery has been bumpy. The Wormsers’ Hampden Township house burned to the ground two months after Mark died. Years of therapy followed the tragedy.

Today, Wormser lives in New Cumberland and leads the Suicide Survivors Group that meets monthly at Polyclinic Hospital in Harrisburg.

And she continues to heal a little bit each day.

“It doesn’t come after me like a sledgehammer anymore,” she says of the pain.

This is her story.

A tragic day

Wormser understands all too well the hell the Bischofs are living. She has lived it since returning home from work the day she discovered Mark had hung himself.

“I look at it as Mark took himself out of his own personal hell and put me in it,” she says quietly at her kitchen table.

Wormser says her youngest son “seemed to enjoy life.” He looked forward to the things typical 15-year-olds do — getting a driver’s license and his first job.

A Florida Marlins baseball fan, Mark rode skateboards in the summer and snowboards in the winter. He studied karate. He wrote poetry and had a girlfriend he loved. Proficient in computers, he talked of becoming Microsoft-certified or even attending West Point after high school.

Mark was the kid who sought out wandering students in the hallways and pointed them in the right direction, his mother says. He was known as “Little Worm,” while older brother Kevin was the original “Worm.”

“Mark had an eye out for how other people were doing,” Wormser says. “He was very charming. That’s not to say we didn’t have typical teenage ups and downs because we did.”

She recalls no specific incidents that led her to believe Mark would take his own life. He was a normal teenager, she says, and that includes typical “rebellious behavior.”

Mark toyed with coloring his hair, but he never did. He was surprised when his mother gave her permission for him to pierce his ears. He never did. Once early that summer, Mark ran away and was gone all night. That episode was quickly forgotten.

“He was spending a lot of time on the Internet, but he said he was chatting with his friends,” Wormser says. “That was a mistake I guess — having the computer in his room.”

She later discovered that Mark’s webpage included observations on suicide.

A change

Mark’s mood changed for the worse the summer before his death.Hewithdrew, spending more time in front of the computer.

Finally, his mother suspected he was cutting himself.

“I had seen the scratches on his arm and he’d say ‘The cat scratched me’ or ‘I was roughhousing with the dog,’” Wormser recalls.

Later, Mark admitted he had cut himself “to prove to himself that he was alive,” she says. A picture in a spare bedroom shows Mark skateboarding that summer while wearing a long-sleeved coat. Wormser now believes he was hiding self-inflicted wounds on his arms.

She recognized the cry for help and got Mark into therapy. Unfortunately, she was unaware of the depths of his depression — underscored in the poetry he wrote and the suicidal messages she later read on his website.

“There were some dark places in that poetry,” she says. “He was so good at hiding things from me I guess.”

As therapy progressed, Wormser became a vigilant protector of her son, making nightly phone calls from work and urging him to make morning promises regarding his own safety.

“I made him promise not to take his life that day,” she says, recalling a typical conversation. “I did whatever I thought I needed to do to keep him going.”

The two-week program at PinnacleHealth was “very focused,” Wormser says. “Unfortunately, Mark balked at most of it. He wasn’t doing a lot to open up or cooperate.”

The program took place in October. Mark wrapped it up a day early and did not go back. Still, the Wormsers had high hopes.

“I didn’t have a lot of anxiety about it because I knew that kids who cut themselves are not generally suicidal,” Wormser recalls. “I thought we had a pretty clear road ahead of us. I thought he’d get the help he needed and we’d be OK.

“After we discovered he was suicidal, I don’t remember much about that time. I know we had a great deal of difficulty getting him to go to therapy.”

Mark was prescribed Prozac. His mother later learned he stopped taking the drug sometime before his death.

Initially, “he showed no hesitation,” she recalls. “He took it very willingly. I thought he was taking it. I probably should have watched him take them every day.”

Wormser concedes the likelihood that “as a parent you’re looking for signs that your child is better or over (the crisis).”

‘Tried several times to get through’

Wormser frequently called home from work to check on her sons. The night Mark died, she believes he was on the computer for several hours.

“I don’t have a clear picture of what happened that night,” Wormser says. “I tried several times to get through that evening and I never did.”

Returning home after her 3-11 p.m. shift, Wormser found Mark’s lifeless body.

She futilely tried to revive him with CPR. A suicide note in his pocket revealed 13 wishes. Among the most disturbing is Mark’s wish “not to be remembered.”

“Everybody wonders why,” Wormser says. “Why would this wonderful boy not want to be remembered?”

Wormser feared for Kevin and became fiercely protective or her remaining son. Research indicates family members of a suicide victim are susceptible to repeating the tragedy. Wormser admits the thought crossed her mind once or twice.

“I remember thinking wouldn’t it be nice to join Mark,” she says. “I wanted to be there to guide him through the afterlife.”

Wormser has few memories of the days and weeks following her son’s death.

“I remember going to plan his funeral with the funeral director,” she says. “It was something that I had to do for my son. For the first week or so you’re kind of on autopilot.”

Mark’s best friend insisted on speaking and did so quietly. Another friend played “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes.

Every so often, Wormser hears from someone who was at Mark’s funeral. Most of the time she does not remember having seeing that person.

She calls her work as a nurse at Harrisburg Hospital “my saving grace” and credit co-workers for keeping her alive.

“After Mark died, I remember thinking the best thing that would happen to me was I would go to work. It kept me sane for awhile. But for the first few months, it wouldn’t take more than five minutes for Mark to creep into my mind. Anything and everything would remind me of him…

“For months and months the first year,” she adds that “every time I drove home from work I would almost always cry because it would be all that pent-up anxiety from being at work.”

Therapy helped Wormser work through the grieving process.

“For those first few months my thoughts of Mark were almost never happy memories,” she says. “Now it’s very comforting to know I can think about Mark… and I rarely cry. I wonder if that isn’t because I cried all the tears out of me. Now mostly I tend to feel like I want to cry when I find out about somebody else who has lost somebody to suicide.

“I remember the first day I didn’t shed a tear for Mark,” she says, “and I felt so guilty. It got to be about 10 (p.m.) or so and I remembered I hadn’t shed a tear for Mark… I was berating myself for not crying for my son.”

A graduation remembrance

Principal Dominic Cavallaro urged CV families to remember both Mark Wormser and Corey Bischof during the class’ June 8 graduation ceremonies at The Giant Center in Hershey.

In the front row, Wormser and a friend sat with the Bischofs. Random thoughts raced through her mind as Cavallaro spoke: “Don’t cry… Don’t make a fool out of yourself… Be strong for the Bischofs…”

Candles were lit in honor of Wormser and Bischof and their parents were called forward to receive diplomas meant for their deceased sons.

“I was told by people in the audience that it was very moving and very touching,” Wormser says.

Although she still cries easily when talking about her late son, the graduation represented a healing of sorts.

“A certain calm came over me since his graduation,” she says. “I don’t feel that inner churning that I feel a lot when I think about Mark.”

Helping to ease the pain

Dottie Wormser might not have survived were it not for her suicide support group.

Now she is taking over as facilitator of the group — which meets the first Wednesday of every month at Polyclinic Hospital, 1 Landis, Simpson Board Room, 2501 N.Third St., Harrisburg.

A licensed social worker, Ned Hoffner, ran the support group for the last seven years. About 8-10 people attend — some for many years.

“We have parents, we have grandparents, we have siblings, we have spouses,” he says. “While the pain is still there for them, they’ve moved on to some degree. That pain will always be there for them but they’ve found a better way to control it.”

Most of the members in the group have lost someone younger than 21, Hoffner notes. “At this time, the makeup of the group is everybody’s grieving a male,” he adds.

Sponsored by WomanCare Resource Center, the group meets from 7-9 p.m.

Young males often choose hanging

Hanging and other forms of suffocation have overtaken guns as the chief means of suicide among American youngsters aged 10-14, according to statistics released last summer.

Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say they first noticed the trend in the early 1990s. By the end of that decade, suffocations had surpassed self-inflected shootings.

Health officials said they do not know why the switch occurred and whether it had anything to do with the use of trigger locks, lock boxes and other measures taken to keep guns out of youngsters’ hands.

By contrast, suffocations are often carried out with common household items such as belts, ropes or plastic bags.

The CDC reports 96 suicides by suffocation among Americans aged 10-14 in 1992.

The number rose to 163 in 2001, with firearm suicides dropping from 172 to 90 during the same period.

Suffocation suicides also rose among teens aged 15-19 during the same period (from 333 deaths a year to 551).

Firearms remain the most common means of suicide for that group, although the number of deaths from self-inflicted shootings dropped from 1,251 a year to 838, the CDC says.

Overall, the suicide rate for ages 10 to 19 fell by about a quarter, from 6.2 deaths per 100,000 people in 1992 to 4.6 per 100,000 in 2001, the CDC adds.

2005 The Sentinel, Carlisle, Pa. unless otherwise noted.
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