No. 18 Vol. 4
My Life Publications • 973-809-4784
April 2022
Livingston Family Remembers Deceased Teen by Spreading Mental Health Awareness
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By Alexander Rivero ome pains are more unimaginable than others, and few are as unimaginable as the loss of a child by suicide. On July 29, 2021, Shiv Kulkarni, a fourteenyear-old freshman at Livingston High School, died by suicide while on an excursion into Manhattan with his family. Since that day, his parents and sister have been left to pick up the pieces of the boy’s life, to dig for answers, and to offer their insights to the world around them. They have done this, and continue to do this, all the while pushing for a more compassionate and inclusive approach to mental health in young people, especially as it relates to those that identify as LGBTQ, such as Shiv. In September, 2021, Shiv’s mother, Shilpa, addressed the Livingston Board of Education (LBOE) about her son’s death and what we can do as a community to prevent similar things from happening in the future. She sought to revisit the situation by calling the group of parents and community members to look at themselves and revisit what could have been done differently. Some lessons the Kulkarni family learned—via therapy, extensive reading, reflecting, conversing with others— was the need to return to fundamentals in the support structures for our children, both within schools and within the community at large, and to do it early in a child’s development to prevent them from having to absorb the lessons suddenly and without warning at some point in their future. “I’ve been speaking a lot on this since then, the need to focus on the mental hygiene of our children,” says Shilpa. “Just like we teach them to brush their teeth when they’re
young so that they grow up with the habit of sound dental hygiene and continue it on into their independent lives, we need to introduce coping strategies, build resiliency— mental hygiene—to take care of their brain health as they transition through puberty, through youth into adulthood.” One of Shilpa’s concerns is the fact that when it comes continued on page 2