The life & death of a ‘perfect human.’ A N.J. teen’s suicide reveals the … – NJ.com

With every breath, Shiv Kulkarni felt the pressure of who he was supposed to be.

The 14-year-old boy with wavy black hair was always the smart one. The mature one. The one Indian mothers in well-to-do Livingston pointed to and said, “Why can’t you be more like him?”

But behind his veneer of academic perfection, Shiv was wrestling with the inner turmoil of hidden secrets. He was gay. He was depressed. And he was thinking about killing himself.

Then the pain became too much.

Shiv swallowed a bottle of Children’s Motrin in January 2021. At the lowest moment of his life, he FaceTimed his best friend, Tanirika Singh, from the emergency room.

Emotionally drained and wrapped in a hospital gown, he didn’t want support. He wanted damage control.

“I need you to tell everyone that I’m grounded,” Shiv told her, emphasizing the gravity of keeping his secrets safe. “They can’t know.”

Six months later, everyone found out what he was hiding when he leapt off the top of the Vessel in Manhattan, his horrified mother screaming as she watched him die before her eyes.

No one will ever know exactly why Shiv killed himself. But family and friends say he was terrified of being viewed as different as he grappled with his sexuality, cultural identity, major depressive disorder and the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic. His death is part of an unprecedented mental health crisis that continues to escalate among adolescents, especially vulnerable LGBTQ kids who often feel rejected.

“He was still our child. He was still the same Shiv,” said his mother Shilpa Kulkarni, her voice shaking as she wiped tears from her brown eyes. “And he’s gone.”

Shiv died July 29, 2021, just a few weeks shy of his 15th birthday. NJ Advance Media is telling his story as part of Portraits of a Crisis, an occasional series shining light on the experiences of teens during an alarming mental health epidemic.

LGBTQ teens have long faced a higher risk of depression because of stigma and discrimination, and the pandemic only exacerbated those challenges, said Petros Levounis, chair of Rutgers New Jersey Medical School’s psychiatry department.

Twenty years of progress, gay-centric TV shows and pride flags on lawns might make it seem like LGBTQ kids are universally accepted and have nothing to fear. But Shiv saw a different world, a reality where coming out is just as fraught and intensely painful as ever, even if laws have changed and popular culture has moved on.

“We still live in a highly homophobic society,” said Levounis, elected last year as the first openly gay president of the American Psychiatric Association. “The idea that every year that passes it gets better is only partially correct.”

Nearly half of gay, lesbian and bisexual teens said they had seriously considered attempting suicide during the first six months of 2021, compared with 14% of their heterosexual peers, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study published in April. Meanwhile, one in four teenagers identifying as LGBTQ reported attempting suicide in that period.

Shiv isn’t a statistic, his family and friends say. The statistics are Shiv. There are thousands of teens struggling with the same questions and concerns about how their sexual orientation will impact their lives — even in a blue state like New Jersey, even here in a leafy suburb in the shadow of New York City.

He was intensely worried what his conservative Indian family would think of his sexual identity and how he would be viewed in the South Asian community, his family and friends say.

It’s common for LGBTQ teens like Shiv, who could be marginalized for their race, sexual preference or mental health issues, to struggle with the intersection of their various identities, according to Edward Alessi, a Rutgers University professor of social work who studies LBGTQ mental health, trauma and resilience.

“It’s so complex,” he said. “And you can’t disentangle them.”

Shiv felt like he was “collecting all the trophies of being different,” said Tanirika, 16.

“He was very, very anxious about, what does it mean for the future? What does it mean for him in his life? What doors are still open?” said his father Vishwas Kulkarni, a tall, 50-year-old man with dark hair and a thin mustache.

Shiv never wanted to be the poster child for depression or for gay South Asian kids, Tanirika said. He just wanted to eat the Millburn Deli’s Soprano sandwich, learn the latest TikTok dance and blast music in his best friend’s basement.

Shiv just wanted to be happy.

‘The perfect human’

Shilpa and Vishwas Kulkarni had all but given up on having children after 12 agonizing miscarriages.

But when all hope seemed lost, along came Shiv, their miracle baby. A year and half later, Saanvi, Shiv’s sister, was born. The two were inseparable.

“Suddenly, we had two beautiful children,” said Shilpa, 51, a part-time operations manager at Hivebrite with long black hair and glasses.

Shilpa and Vishwas, a quantitative risk analyst at RBC, describe themselves as “intentional” parents. The Indian immigrants waited so long for kids that they wanted to give them everything. Piano lessons. Karate classes. The best academic programs, even if it meant their children attended a Jewish preschool where they were the only Indian kids.

Shiv was always smart and competitive. But he was also gentle and kind — at least when he wasn’t playfully teasing Saanvi, now 14.

Shiv had no trouble making friends, especially once the other Indian parents heard how smart he was, Shilpa said. He even won the 5th grade class president election on a promise of bringing back ice cream to the school cafeteria.

When the school didn’t follow through, Shiv badgered the principal until ice cream reappeared.

“He was extremely persistent,” Shilpa said.

Teachers recognized he was special when he reached middle school in 2018, according to Suzanne Steckert, his English teacher at Mt. Pleasant Middle School.

“We would just say ‘Shiv’ and then just sigh with gratitude for having him as a student,” she said.

Outside the classroom, Shiv played piano, volleyball and competitive table tennis, where he bonded with Livingston classmate Oishik Mukherjee.

Oishik, 15, described Shiv as the smartest person in the room, a hilarious friend with a monster forehand.

“In my eyes, he was the perfect human being,” he said.

No one realized what was going on inside Shiv’s head until September 2020, when Shilpa glanced at Shiv’s phone and saw he was on Discord, a popular messaging and discussion groups app.

Shiv was on a page about sexual orientation. Shilpa told her son they needed to have a conversation.

“Are you gay?” she asked.

Shiv looked at his mother. He started crying.

Coming out in a crisis

Shiv wasn’t ashamed of being gay, Tanirika said.

When he casually came out to her in November 2020, he was proud and happy.

But Shiv, then in eighth grade, wasn’t ready for the rest of the world to know.

He didn’t want to come out in middle school, where kids tear each other apart for even the smallest of differences. And he certainly didn’t want to come out in Livingston, where he knew many families in the large South Asian community view homosexuality as taboo.

“He wanted to come out one by one to whoever he felt comfortable with,” Tanirika said. “But he knew that when you’re in the South Asian community, your business is almost everyone’s business.”

Shiv also heard his father express support for conservative politicians Shiv considered homophobic, Vishwas said. But Shilpa and Vishwas told him they loved him and accepted him no matter what when he came out to them after the phone incident.

Shiv insisted they tell no one.

Not his grandmother, who moved in with the family during the pandemic.

Not even Saanvi.

Young people aren’t automatically more likely to experience depression because they are gay or transgender, Alessi said. But they are at heightened risk for mental health issues because of the stigma, bias and rejection they often face.

And pushback against inclusive curriculum in schools, transgender athletes and other LGBTQ issues has proliferated across the country, according to Alessi.

“It’s not that being gay or LGBTQ is the problem,” Alessi said. “It’s the way people react to you.”

The mental health system isn’t necessarily a safe haven from those negative reactions. Not all therapists, psychiatrists and hospital staff are trained to provide affirming treatment, according to Samantha Hanson, a program manager for Garden State Equality, New Jersey’s largest LGBTQ advocacy organization.

But Shiv’s parents had never been close with anyone who is gay. They suggested he talk to a therapist about his sexual orientation.

“Where is he getting his education, sex education, for example, or any of that stuff?” Shilpa said. “That was our biggest concern.”

Shilpa insisted on finding an LGBTQ therapist, which can be a long and daunting process because of huge demand and short supply.

The first therapist Shilpa reached out to was totally booked. But she made a virtual appointment with another about a month and a half after Shiv came out to his parents.

Shilpa and Vishwas breathed a sigh of relief.

This was the Kulkarni model. Give Shiv the right resources, like a good table tennis coach or a competition math teacher. Then watch him succeed.

But the therapist called after nearly two months of weekly sessions.

“He needs a much higher level of care than I’m able to provide,” she said.

The therapist told Shiv’s parents he was cutting.

‘Am I crazy?’

Shiv’s reaction still haunts the Kulkarnis.

“He was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to have to see a loony kind of doctor,’” Vishwas said when a psychiatrist was broached. “That really bothered him.”

Therapy was one thing. But seeing a psychiatrist? To Shiv, that sounded like he was spiraling out of control.

“Am I crazy?” he wondered to Tanirika.

During the long quarantine days of 2020 and early 2021, Shiv talked about missing the normal rhythm of life. He complained of spending morning to night in his room, logging onto the same virtual classes and interacting with the same small friend group online.

“Every day, every minute, we used to think, how do we help our child?” Shilpa said. “The missing piece was we did not understand depression. We did not understand where he came from.

“We did not understand what he needed most.”

On Jan. 17, 2021, just two days before his first scheduled appointment with a psychiatrist, he FaceTimed his mom from his bedroom, tears streaming down his face. Shilpa raced across the house and found her son with an empty bottle.

The doctor in the emergency room gave Shilpa the good news. Children’s Motrin wouldn’t kill her son.

“He felt like such a failure,” Shilpa said. “That he couldn’t even do this right.”

Highs and lows

The family navigated a labyrinth of disappointment through the mental health system after Shiv’s suicide attempt.

First, he waited in the emergency department at Cooperman Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston for four days because there were no available beds in inpatient psychiatric units.

Then, he spent a seven-day stabilization stint in the unit at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center, which felt like a punishment to Shiv, Vishwas said.

And then Shiv, diagnosed with major depressive disorder, enrolled in a virtual partial hospitalization program with group therapy, art therapy and other programming through GenPsych, a mental health treatment center, for four months beginning in February 2021.

The Kulkarnis were leery of medication, but they knew Shiv needed help. He cycled through the trial-and-error gauntlet of medications offered to depressed teens: Prozac, then olanzapine, followed by Lexapro, Abilify and finally lithium.

He kept wondering when he would find his “magic pill.”

Meanwhile, Shilpa and Vishwas tried everything they could think of to care for him. Dance classes. A nutritionist. They even bought Shiv a lovable white sheepadoodle puppy named Benji.

When eighth grade ended in June 2021, the Kulkarni family hoped summer would be just what he needed.

Shiv and his lifelong friend Priyanka Agarwal, now 16, joined a two-week virtual debate camp in late June that kept them busy from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. They argued over topics like whether NATO should increase its defense in the Baltic states.

“It was really intense,” Priyanka said. “We loved it.”

But then came a crushing disappointment in mid-July. Shiv was scheduled to spend two weeks at a Massachusetts summer camp in the Berkshire Mountains that advertised itself as LGBTQ friendly.

He came home after just four days. Some of the staff used homophobic slurs, Shiv said. If that wasn’t bad enough, kids made fun of him for being Indian.

“When I picked him up, he was very upset,” Shilpa said. “He just said, ‘I just wish that I was white and gay instead of brown and gay.’”

Seeing their child demoralized, Shiv’s parents came up with an idea to salvage his summer. The family arrived in New York City on July 28, 2021 for what was supposed to be a three-day getaway.

After a good day in the city, everything seemed perfect.

The kids asked Shilpa to sleep in their hotel room that night, where they formed a massage train and talked about their plans for the next day. Shiv and Saanvi wanted to go to SoHo, but the forecast was rainy. Instead, the family decided to tour a relatively new landmark, the Vessel.

“I thought it would be like a big ship,” Saanvi said.

The 154 interconnecting flights of stairs leading to Instagrammable views of the city had already been the site of three suicides since opening in 2019. But the Kulkarnis didn’t know this.

Shiv and Saanvi raced to the top as fast as they could, snapping photos on their phones. After a few minutes, Shilpa and Vishwas said it was time to go.

With his family only a few feet away, Shiv lingered at the top.

Then, in a split second, Shilpa’s miracle baby was gone.

The perfect storm

None of it seemed real to Saanvi. Not until they wheeled out Shiv’s casket two days later at the funeral.

“It was the first time I cried,” she said.

Many young people who attempt suicide and survive offer a common explanation, according to Maureen Brogan, a counselor who leads the Traumatic Loss Coalitions for Youth at Rutgers University.

They didn’t really want to die.

They just didn’t know how to live anymore.

“They feel trapped in this world that they’re living,” Brogan said, “with no other way out.”

Shiv told Tanirika how unhappy he felt no matter how many tests he aced or teachers he pleased. How he felt like a monumental burden knowing his parents were spending thousands of dollars for his treatment. How he never fully opened up in therapy because he worried he would be sent away, never to return.

He didn’t see room for a gay kid like himself in his world.

“He always wanted to go to a big metropolitan city where there’d be other people like him, or, you know, there would be gay bars and there would be fun places for him to enjoy himself and just be a regular teenager,” Tanirika said. “He always said, ‘I hate feeling like I’m under this category, where I just have to meet all the checkboxes in this town.’”

Shiv’s feelings are common in cases of teen suicide, especially among LGBTQ teens who feel as though they don’t fit in or belong, according to Brogan.

“It’s almost like all of these risk factors coming together and creating this perfect storm,” she said.

Shiv’s story is over now — the beginning, middle and end memorialized in a thick, black photo album on the coffee table in the Kulkarni living room.

Baby Shiv with cake frosting smeared across his face on his 1st birthday. Young Shiv eating a popsicle on the rocks at Central Park. Fifth grade graduation. Shilpa’s 50th birthday party. The day Shiv got Benji.

Less than an hour before Shiv died, Shilpa leaned in close at brunch and wrapped her arm around her son. They smiled for the camera, the sides of their heads touching.

“He had a great future in front of him,” Shilpa said softly. “But unfortunately, this world actually missed out on his light.”

The Kulkarnis are telling their story to underscore the seriousness of depression and to help LGBTQ kids find acceptance. They’ve founded the nonprofit Shiv’s Third Eye to provide mental health resources for young people, support LGBTQ teens and fundraise for research of better treatments.

In June, Shiv’s Third Eye hosted a pride picnic in Livingston, sending a visible message to the LGBTQ kids in town:

You belong.

“We can’t let this happen to others,” Shilpa said. “If we don’t share our experience and people don’t learn from it, what’s the point?”

Still in pain, they are “a broken family,” she said.

They will never be complete.

“I feel horrible,” Shilpa said, “because I feel like, why did it take my child’s life for me to understand him?”

Suicidal thoughts and behaviors can be reduced. If you are in crisis, call the National 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing 9-8-8 or visiting 988lifeline.org.

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Adam Clark may be reached at aclark@njadvancemedia.com.

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