Rian, left, and Heather Van Gorp (Photo courtesy of the Van Gorp family)
September is National Suicide Prevention Month, and the last few years — the last six months in particular — have been tough on my Bondurant community with the tragic losses of three Bondurant-Farrar students and alumni who died by suicide.
A freshman boy two years ago. A recent grad last May. And as I was working on this article, a 12-year-old girl in seventh grade.
Sadly, Bondurant isn’t unique, as other Des Moines-area schools have also grappled with similar losses. Perhaps what’s more startling for Bondurant is that, while we’re a growing school district and community, we’re not considered large, and our number of losses seem disproportionate. Additionally, our losses have ranged in ages, genders, racial backgrounds, and circumstances. But all have carried one similarity: they all had a history of being bullied.
I recently had the opportunity to speak at length with one of the mothers in our community who lost her child to suicide last spring. Our conversation was powerful, enlightening, and so important for us all to consider.
I’d never met Heather Van Gorp before our talk, but we discovered many things in common. Our kids are roughly the same ages and know each other, we have similar work experiences, and know many of the same people. Heather and her husband, Kevin, moved their family to Bondurant in 2008, and her three children attended and graduated from Bondurant-Farrar High School. Her oldest son in 2019, her daughter in 2022, and youngest son in 2024.
Rian Van Gorp (Photo courtesy of the Van Gorp familly)
Heather’s only daughter, Rian, was a happy child. A cute blonde with an infectious smile and energy. She grew into a beautiful young woman and was described as having an “enduring
personality,” and “lit up the world from day one.” Throughout her life, she had many friends and meaningful relationships, loved her family, her pets, and socializing.
But during her 7th grade year in junior high school, Heather noticed a big change in Rian’s normally bubbly personality. She became quieter, withdrawn, and noticeably cried more often. Heather soon discovered that Rian had started to engage in “cutting.”
Cutting is the practice of using a sharp object like a razor blade, knife, or scissors to make marks, cuts, or scratches on one’s own body as a form of self-injury as way to cope with emotional pain, intense pressure, and anxiety when the person may not know healthier ways to get relief.
Self-injuring can also include a person burning, scratching, or hitting themselves; banging their head; pulling their hair; pinching their skin; piercing their skin with needles or sharp objects; or inserting objects under their skin. People who cut or self-injure often start doing it as teens, and it can continue into adulthood.
With the discovery of the cutting, Heather learned that Rian had experienced an upheaval in her longtime circle of friends. Rian and another girl had, without explanation, been “kicked out” of their group at the direction of the group “leader,” and Rian was being ostracized, taunted, called explicit names, and was even told in a Snapchat message from a classmate to “kill herself.”
Heather and the father of the other girl wanted to report the harassment to school administrators, but both Rian and the other girl resisted because they worried it would only make their situation worse.
Knowing her family’s history of depression and anxiety, Heather got Rian into private counseling, and Rian later started taking a combination of anti-depressant, anti-anxiety, and ADHD medications. She also attended therapy sessions once a week for several months.
But private counseling can be expensive, upwards of $120/hour for good therapists, and the counselor Rian connected most with and preferred didn’t take insurance. And like so many families, Heather said after a certain point they could no longer afford it with other critical bills to pay for their family of five. Even though Rian’s fractured friend group and ostracization lasted for several years, the counseling and medication did help, and she eventually stopped cutting.
In high school, Rian had a best friend and a boyfriend, played volleyball and basketball, was friendly and outgoing, and overall doing better. After graduation, she got a job and moved in with her longtime boyfriend.
When the relationship ended a year later, Rian moved back home. In early 2024, she started a new job working with children with autism as a Residential Behavioral Technician. She loved the work and was a natural fit. She was still social and spending time with friends, but had started to experience serious migraine headaches and dealt with ongoing insomnia — common side effects of the types of medications she was taking.
Then in February 2024, Rian experienced a series of seizures and was hospitalized. During that hospital stay, Heather saw signs Rian was cutting again, and realized Rian had increasing internal despair and she’d been masking it for some time. She was also likely turning to alcohol and other recreational substances to help subdue the side effects of her medications and her emotional turmoil.
Her three days in the hospital only made things worse. Rian felt like she possibly had a neurological issue, but that her medical team had their own agenda and assumptions about her, and weren’t listening. She quickly lost trust in them, and the medical community in general. She went home, and eventually ceased all her medications.
The last month of Rian’s life, Heather noted changes in Rian’s personality. She had angry outbursts, started fights with friends, and was pushing people away. More and more, Rian felt out of sorts, and told Heather her “insides felt like a hurricane.” She couldn’t hide the emotional and mental turmoil anymore. Because Rian was now an adult, there were limits to what her family could do to intervene.
Then on May 7, Rian had another outburst and initiated an argument with a friend. Heather said that Rian, amid her emotional turmoil, had started to question all her friendships, and it’s easy to wonder if this turmoil resurfaced old pain and insecurities from her adolescent years of being bullied.
When Rian went to her room that night, Heather knew her daughter was struggling, but had no concerns she might be at risk of suicidal ideations. She’d never expressed any before.
But later that night, the hurricane raging inside Rian became too much.
Deaths by suicide can have medical contributing factors — situational depression, clinical depression, and serious mental illness. But at its root, the biggest contributor is despair that the emotions will never change. The hurricane of pain keeps returning. The old hurts keep resurfacing.
When we talk about death from suicide in young people, in so many cases it’s impossible to separate it from how they’re being treated by their peers. We return again and again to the issue of bullying and its far-reaching repercussions.
Last week, after her daughter’s death, the mother of the 12-year-old girl posted a message on our community Facebook page that read in part:
“A post has been shared if anyone would like to attend her visitation, we just ask for no pictures to be taken of her as we do not wish for her bullying to continue.”
I read that line and thought, what have we let our children become?
It’s time we realized this issue has gone way beyond the responsibility of our schools, and the true responsibility lies at our own feet. It’s time we take hard looks at our families, and when needed, say hard but necessary things to our own kids:
Stop. You’re being cruel. What you’re doing is causing serious harm.
Name-calling of any kind to someone’s face or behind their back is cruel.
Spreading negative rumors of any kind about someone is cruel.
Laughing at or mocking someone’s appearance to their face or behind their back is cruel.
Purposefully ostracizing another person in the cafeteria, on sports teams, in classrooms, in hallways, during evening and weekend gatherings, in friend groups, and on social media is cruel.
Making fun of someone’s pictures and posts on social media is cruel.
Trolling on social media is cruel.
Sending hateful private messages to another person is cruel.
Making prank phone calls to a targeted person is cruel.
Creating group chats talking negatively about another person is cruel.
Your behavior is causing another person real pain and damage.
Your behavior is unacceptable.
You can be better than this.
We must recognize that sometimes it’s our own kids behaving this way. And we must address it with them. We must be blunt. We must be specific. Just saying “be kind” or “don’t be a bully” isn’t enough anymore.
Friendships ebb and flow. Adolescent friend groups change all the time. Our kids don’t all have to be friends, don’t all have to like each other, but they can be taught to co-exist without torturing each other to death and turning their smartphones into weapons of mass destruction.
As for my community, we will remember these bright young people not for their deaths, but for their brief, beautiful lives. And we won’t forget their names:
Aidan.
Rian.
Vanessa.
We’ll heed Heather Van Gorp’s advice. Keep listening to our kids when they’re hurting. Advocate for them as much as we can. Provide unconditional love and support.
And, if or when our own kids are causing the hurt, say the hard and specific things.
Say, “You can be better than this.”
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