Abstract
"Teenage Wasteland" is a book that cleverly combines pure participant research and personal experience. The book delves into the unexplained suicides that occur in a small suburban town of Bergenfield, New Jersey. The paper summarizes the main points of the book and then presents the theories used by Donna Gaines to understand why the suicides occurred.

From the Paper
"In order to understand what really happened and why, Gaines travels to Bergenfield in order to attempt assimilation into the culture of those who were friends or peers of the four suicide victims. The adaptation into the lives of these kids does not present itself as a simple task. These kids aren't jocks, brains, preps, or anything in between, by any means. They are the outsiders. They represent the outcasts or the "burnouts" that could only relate to one another. They share the same taste in music, similar views on life, and comparable family structures. But, what else is so intimately shared that makes four teenagers want to die together? That is one of Gaines? curiosities. She asks herself ?What could be so intimately binding that in the early morning hours of March 11 not one of them could stop, step back from the pact they had made to say, "Wait, I can't do this"?? (Gaines, 1991, p. 9) "

Tags:bergenfield, outsiders, suicide, suicides