Four student deaths at UW River Falls, in pretty quick succession – with all of them apparently serious depressives … That sounds very much like a cluster, one death inspiring another.
[Tania] Riske said [her daughter] Sabrina struggled with severe depression for many years. She had a team of counselors and doctors working with her in her hometown of Eau Claire. But Sabrina declined help from campus counselors, Riske said…
“A lot of people were asking me what [the university] could have done better. I don’t think it had anything to do with a shortcoming,” Riske said. “I think they are doing appropriate things. And I’m happy about that.”
As with this earlier post about campus suicide clusters, the problem is not necessarily a lack of school support, though obviously there’s always room for a school to monitor some students more closely, add therapists, etc. The problem is that in some cases of severe protracted depression there’s not much that love, pills, ketamine, teams of counselors and doctors, etc., can do. It’s a hellishly powerful drive, the drive to leave.
The mother of a suicide (her son’s name was Seth) talks about another recent suicide (John).
You could not have prevented it. Even if you think that you could have on that particular occasion, there is no guarantee that it would not have happened some other time. If you are wondering why you didn’t go with John or ask him to come over if he seemed out of sorts, don’t blame yourself. Seth’s roommate was in an adjoining room when he died. Having someone nearby made no difference at all.
If you’re trying to make rational sense of how something like this could happen to someone with such talent and such a bright future, you really can’t think about it rationally — there is no rational explanation. Normal people, those who are not sick in some way, do not kill themselves. Our most basic human instinct is for survival, so to cause one’s own demise subverts that in ways our healthy intellects can’t imagine.
If you’re thinking that John made a choice to end his life, I can’t agree. Whatever was tormenting him — depression, mental illness, some event that threw his mental wiring off kilter — that is what took him. As I said before, it isn’t a rational choice. Suicides are committed by people driven by a distorted mental and emotional reality. It isn’t really a choice.
Americans are practical, success-oriented, ingenious, optimistic, religious — it’s arguably particularly hard for Americans to come to grips with the deathward tenacity of some suicidal people.
I mean, maybe we can grasp this in a frail eighty-year old. A twenty year old college student?
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Forget slipped the surly bonds: We’re talking stripped the bonds off hard, with both hands. “I’m climbing up through the clouds and then just gonna head out outside of everything,” a 23 year old student pilot not long ago radioed a confused traffic controller before crashing his plane. He desperately wanted out of everything. His words have gone viral – there’s poetry in head out outside of everything – and we should pay attention to them. Some suicides are virtually punching their way out of the atmosphere. Hard to go up against such people.
January 28th, 2024 at 2:38PM
Isn’t it relatively unusual for parents to respond in this sober way though? In my experience of campus suicides, parents were either themselves in the dark about the student’s struggles (often everyone is in the dark!) and so blamed the school for failing to act on the grounds that, had the kid been at home, they would’ve surely seen the signs and prevented it, or they’re just so overcome with grief that they want someone or something to blame, b/c as you say, the idea of a healthy twenty year-old college student with so much potential just snuffing all that out is hard to rationally comprehend. If all parents said this though, we’d never be in the position of transforming universities into “academic wellness centers” in the first place.
In answer to your comment on the previous post though, I don’t think the bulking up of the campus therapy apparatus is that innocuous, even for the neurotics who are benefitted by having a counselor to cry about their break-up to. It’s precisely the neurotics who should be discouraged from pathologizing their neuroses and convincing themselves that they have clinical illnesses rather than just poor coping ability that they could improve with some effort. The changes that a mass therapeutic mindset creates are really harmful for the young, as of course Lasch predicted. If it were actually preventing suicides, maybe we could justify it, but it’s not preventing the ones that it was created to prevent – the acute, often sudden, bottomless depression-sparked ones of college students – and it’s probably setting up a few more susceptible souls for suicides down the line that could’ve been averted had a little more resilience been demanded of them earlier on.
I see this in my students now – since about 2015 or 2016, just an enormous increase in the number of kids who can’t complete coursework or courses themselves because of a laundry list of “mental health” conditions. I’m sure some of it is cynical system-gaming, b/c “I feel stressed b/c it is finals week and I have a lot of work!” doesn’t get a university official to demand an extension for you, whereas “I have Anxiety Disorder” does. But even those students usually talk themselves into it. It also has big differential effects for the (poorer, minority) students I teach now relative to the (richer, whiter) ones I taught before, b/c when my current students withdraw from classes, they get put on probation, fail to graduate, and get saddled with lots of debt on top of a mindset that life is impossible and they are completely incompetent. An inauspicious start to adult life.
January 28th, 2024 at 3:36PM
The “It can’t be prevented” argument is not valid, in my experience. Suicide is an impulse, and if that impulse, or the scenario the person has written to end their life, if its interrupted, or derailed, they survive the impulse.That’s why the availability of guns to someone with suicidal ideation is so dangerous.
There are determined suicides, to be sure, and the drive to end their life can be overwhelming. You don’t win all the time.
January 28th, 2024 at 7:18PM
Matt: Pretty sure we’re on the same page. Not all suicides are impulsive; some deeply thought-out, or simply deeply rooted, suicides are going to turn out to be beyond our interventions.
January 29th, 2024 at 12:47PM
Rita: I agree with all of the above. A suicide cluster at a college shouldn’t prompt a Therapeutic State response, in which not only resilience, but the message that students inhabit an intellectual rather than psychiatric community, is undermined.