6:30 P.M. Matt's House

By Flora Tartakovsky

I'm lucky I haven't had a nervous breakdown," says Janet Gewinner as she looks on while her 17-year-old son Matt leaves for hockey practice. She reminds him to take the medication in the kitchen. For him it is a life-and-death issue.

Matt was a relatively well-adjusted teen until the summer of 1998, when his close friend Jeremy DeNeal died in a car accident. "There was no one to get me through Jeremy's funeral, so I had to do it alone," says Matt. "In school I started making comments like 'I'm going to kill myself'...I turned to heavy drugs so I'd be numb."

Psychiatrists determined that Matt was suffering from both manic and severe depression. His daily medication is a cocktail that includes Celexa, lithium, Risperidal, vitamin E and caffeine. Because it left him so exhausted, Janet--an insurance analyst who divorced Matt's father six years ago--cut trazodone from the mix. She keeps most of the medicine hidden because she fears that Matt may try to overdose.

He's tried to kill himself before. In April, Janet found a suicide note from Matt, along with the songs that he wanted played at his funeral. He was hospitalized and released a few days later. When his girlfriend's parents wouldn't let him see her because he was acting unstable, Matt threatened to kill them, but instead slit his wrists. The police came, and once again he was hospitalized. Shortly afterward, Matt overdosed on cold medication.

A student with Matt's history naturally worries school administrators. The week before, Matt says, he asked his Latin teacher, "What happens if you make a threat to kill a teacher? Do you get suspended or expelled?" He says he likes to play mind games and was just curious, but school officials were quick to take action. They immediately called Matt's psychiatrist and his mother and asked his teachers to keep an eye on him. An administrator told him, Matt says, "If I threaten anyone or make any 'I'm going to kill myself' statements, I would be suspended with no questions asked until I could get a doctor's note."

The school's reaction angers Janet. "I think they're trying to take too much control," she says. "I think they're going to look for anything they can, and if they can get him out of school, they'll be relieved. If the situation at Littleton never happened, things would be a lot different now." Matt complains that the school targets students who stand out. "They don't talk to the preppy kids. They flag the kids that are Goth and wear black."

Just before Matt leaves this evening, he pulls out a planner complete with pictures of his deceased friends, business cards of the hospitals he has stayed in and other painful memorabilia. "It's part of my life," says Matt. "I'll show this to my kids."

--F.T.