Hard conversations in music class #1: Death and mental health

When Chris Cornell died, I had a tough conversation with one of my bass students. He’s about 12 (he might have been 11 at the time), really good, really into music. He said he was bummed, and asked me what happened.

I carefully told him the truth. I told him that Chris was sick for a long time, and he had one heck of a life and made some great music, but that not all sickness can be seen on the outside, and he just couldn’t go on anymore.

The same thing happened this past week while I was teaching rock band camp. “How did Kurt die?” “How did Freddie Mercury die?” “What happened to (insert the name of musician here)?”. The kids asked, over and over, about the deaths of their heroes. It’s only natural – one kid yells out from the back “He’s dead. He died.” and another kid, curious, asks how. Then, the whole room waits raptly. Kids can be a bit morbid.

I struggled after these conversations, wondering if I’d done the right thing. I wondered whether they would be traumatized, whether I should have passed the buck to their parents. But their parents weren’t in the room and they didn’t ask them in that moment, they asked me. The best I could do was tell the truth, as gently as I could.

From my perspective, both as a music teacher and someone who has struggled with mental illness my whole life, not telling the truth disrespects the lives of the people in question. It won’t do to pretend that Cornell (or any number of other equally troubled artists who achieved mainstream success) died of an accident. Even worse to turn them into cautionary tales where mental illness and substance abuse get unsympathetically turned into othering tools to warn children against becoming “that kind of person”.

Some of the kids at band camp had a hard time understanding even the existence of things like depression, substance abuse or chronic pain, to the point where I wondered if they’d ever had a significant conversation about any of those things with an adult caregiver before. This, for a thirteen-ish year old kid studying music, is not ideal.

Music history is full of untimely death and misery. The common wisdom goes that artists are a different bunch, plagued by mental illness and substance abuse that often leads to their death. The pantheon of rock ‘n roll (which is what a lot of kids are learning to get started in music) is a prime example of this. Almost every artist that kids walk into music class already knowing has a sad story. I just wish their parents had used that music as an opportunity to have a conversation about mental health with their child.

Whether it’s themselves or a friend, kids might come into contact with mental illness sooner than their parents would like to believe possible – both the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in the US and the Canadian Mental Health Association (as well as other mental health organizations) specifically acknowledge childhood depression as a clinical problem. Some research shows it to be on a worrying rise. The more tools we give kids to cope, the better off we’ll all be. Music can be a great tool to talk about these things, both when we look at the content of specific songs and the lives of the songwriters.

I hope that the kids I teach walk away feeling that they are understood, supported, and taken seriously, and that if they or a friend starts to feel depressed, they know they’re not alone. For the chance of that, I’ll risk the hard conversation – and other adults should too.