The most dangerous pastime--The Choking Game

I had to tell you a sad story though it's not my willing. When Françoise Cochet saw the cord around her son's neck, she knew that he was dead. Fully clothed and still wearing his sneakers, 14-year-old Nicolas had strangled himself sometime after dinner in their apartment in Nice, France. His mother found him the next morning. "I shut the door so my other two children couldn't see and I didn't touch the body," she says. "I thought that I couldn't live anymore. I thought I needed to die too." 

Because Cochet had left her son's body as she found it, police were able to rule out suicide. Instead, they determined that Nicolas had accidentally killed himself playing le jeu de foulard (the "scarf game," as it's known in France), a dangerous activity in which children starve their brain of oxygen to achieve a natural high. 

The Choking Game, the activity involves applying pressure to the neck to stop the blood flow to the brain and then releasing the pressure to create a temporary sense of euphoria. It isn't new: French medical books mention the scarf game as early as the 18th century, and deaths in Britain, Canada and the U.S. have occasionally made the headlines over the years. What is new — and frightening — is that teenagers are now uploading instructional videos to the Internet that glamorize the potentially deadly practice. 

Many teenagers already are dying. Figures on choking-game deaths remain sketchy — a lack of awareness among police means that cases often end up being classified as suicides. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta estimates that at least 82 people died from the activity between 1995 and 2007. But according to the Wisconsin-based campaign group Games Adolescents Shouldn't Play (GASP), as many as 1,000 young people die in the U.S. each year playing some variation of the game. In France, officials identified 17 deaths in 2009, but they suspect that many more go unreported.

The medical community remains divided over whether to publicize asphyxiation games. "There's a fear that if you raise awareness then other people will start to copy it," Field says. Last year, the medical journal Pediatrics reported that one-third of American doctors had never heard of the choking game and only 2% had ever discussed it with teenage patients or their parents. But it appears that many young people are finding out about the activity on their own — potentially without being made aware of the dangers. 

Awareness will also help victims' parents overcome the stigma attached to having a child die this way. People frequently confuse the game with erotic asphyxiation, the sexual practice thought to heighten an orgasm. And they frequently assume that victims suffer from psychiatric conditions like depression. In fact, victims tend to be high-achieving students at school, active in sports and well-behaved, according to doctors and some victims' parents. "They aren't playing this game for sexual gratification," Field says. "It's to get a high without taking drugs." 

Following her son's death, Cochet and her family moved from Nice to Paris in an effort to move on with their lives. "Our children are alone in their bedrooms," she says. "They're getting dizzy, and the great risk is that at any moment their hearts can stop." And when that happens, as Cochet knows all too well, a parent's heart stops too. So lead your children to do proper outdoor exercises now and then, such as golf.

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