If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
It’s clear that many teens struggle with mental health issues. Almost 40% of high school students reported “persistent sadness or hopelessness,” 18% met the criteria for major depression, and 10% attempted suicide, according to data from a November 2025 report by the American Academy of Pediatrics. What remains less clear is which school responses actually help, and which may fall short.
Removing books from classrooms and school libraries that contain sensitive themes, including suicide and suicide ideation, is one common response to student mental health crises. Of the 4,218 unique titles banned in U.S. public K-12 schools during the 2023-24 school year, nearly 60% contain sensitive topics including grief, death, suicide, depression, and other mental health concerns, according to a report by PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for freedom of expression through literature.
One such ban occurred earlier this school year in New Jersey’s South Orange and Maplewood school district, when administrators removed The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a novel by Junot Díaz, from an Advanced Placement English literature class at Columbia High School for the 2025-26 school year. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, a coming-of-age story that contains a scene in which the main character attempts suicide, had long been part of the course’s reading selection, according to Ella Levy, a senior at the school and intern at local news site Village Green, who reported on the issue.
The district administration defended its decision in a memo to the school community: “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a powerful and complex novel, but its themes of loneliness, despair, and tragic death gave us pause in this difficult moment. Timing matters: what is pedagogically rich in one moment can be emotionally harmful in another.”
In a separate media interview with NPR, South Orange and Maplewood Superintendent Jason Bing elaborated on the decision to temporarily remove the book from the AP English course in response to heightened mental health struggles experienced by some students in the district. At least five students enrolled at the district’s Columbia High School attempted suicide this school year, Bing told NPR. “From our perspective,” Bing said, removing Oscar Wao is “a curriculum choice that’s meeting the needs of these specific kids at this specific time.”
Multiple inquiries by Education Week went unanswered by the district’s communications personnel.
The question of how schools should respond to suicide risk may not have a single answer. But several areas are worth examining: the role of teaching literature to high school students, partnerships between teachers and school-based mental health professionals to support vulnerable students, and how to keep students at the center of book removal decisions.
The role of literature in difficult conversations
Jason D. DeHart, an English teacher at Wilkes Central High School in Moravian Falls, N.C., and author of Building Critical Literacy and Empathy with Graphic Novels, sees his role in teaching English to high school students as two-fold.
“On the surface, there’s the skill development that students need for building rhetoric, for communicating. Virtually any path they want to take in life, and virtually every part of their lives, is going to involve some sort of sharing of ideas,” DeHart said. “Part of that is getting to know themselves, getting to know their story, knowing who they are, and having the tools to share their story.”
DeHart says that one way his students get to know themselves is through the many writing assignments he gives them—which also help him get acquainted with his students. “I feel like I have the advantage of getting to know my students, to know some of the things that they’re processing, that way,” he said. “Students carry a lot.”
Much of what weighs on students’ minds can be found in literature, DeHart observed. That includes difficult and sometimes uncomfortable themes.
“I get the discomfort with [suicide in literature], and I think that it does have to be handled in a sensitive and thoughtful way,” DeHart said. “I also think that conversations about topics like that, if they’re framed carefully, can really be healing for students.”
Kasey Meehan, program director for PEN America’s Freedom to Read program, thinks so, too.
“We hear all the time from authors that books save lives, that [young readers say] this was happening to me, but I feel like I got the courage to tell somebody about it because I read your book and saw myself reflected,” Meehan said.
Meehan said she understands the impulse to pull from classes or shelves books on sensitive topics that teens may be experiencing in their own lives.
“It’s really complicated, and it might feel like the safest thing is to just remove it,” she said. “But I feel that, time and time again, censorship is not the appropriate response, and that it won’t increase safety.”
The role of school-based mental health support
Peter Faustino, a school psychologist who works at Scarsdale High School in New York, said decisions like the one in New Jersey are often well intentioned, but may rest on flawed assumptions.
“It may be akin to the myth that ‘talking about suicide’ introduces ideas that were not present before the conversation,” he said. “More often than not, it is prudent to lean into difficult conversations to better understand who needs intervention and assess ways to help those [students] who may be vulnerable.”
That’s where training from school-based mental health professionals can come into play, Faustino explains.
“We train teachers to understand risk factors, signs, and symptoms of suicide and to hand off those students at risk to a trained, highly-qualified school psychologist or mental health professional in the school or community,” he said.
Centering student voices
Listening to students themselves may be one of the most underused tools, Meehan explains.
“I do think students are pretty clear on their needs and what would be helpful to them,” she said.
While administrators in South Orange and Maplewood took full responsibility for the decision to pause the teaching of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, students made clear their feelings about the move. All 47 students from the class where the book was withdrawn, plus an additional 135 students, signed a petition to bring the book back.
The petition included a letter that concluded: “We want to understand and learn from difficult stories, even in the presence of tragic circumstances in our community.”
