A year later, while I was a grad student in California, I learned that the student had shot himself. I felt terrible. So I swore that I’d never again ignore a potential suicide. 

George Chang, a Berkeley prof, recalling his student days at Princeton, wishes he’d said something to someone when a fellow student turned out to have a closet full of guns. That he felt compelled to show people.

The thing is, whether you think this behavior betokens suicide or not (most of us wouldn’t read it that way – maybe we’d want to see it as some form of boasting? intimidation?), you might very well consider it evidence of some mental disturbance… It’s pretty effing weird for an undergraduate to stuff his dorm closet full of almost certainly illegal guns and invite his friends to see them. Like almost asking someone to do something.

This was decades ago, long before scads of campuses became mass murder sites; these days, someone would have screamed about it.

But anyway — with the likely suicide of another Princeton student in the news, there is indeed the question whether anyone noticed anything lethally wrong with Lauren Blackburn. This photo of him, taken I think shortly before his disappearance, shows him with a desperate expression on his face… But it’s almost always asking too much for people to intuit the worst in ordinary daily encounters with people they know. Respect for privacy, the knowledge that almost everyone experiences some depressive episodes and gets over them, a larger American (and campus) culture in which personal freedom matters a lot, maybe a certain fear of a person exhibiting extreme emotions — these and other motives persuade us to stay silent. And of course even if we speak up to the person or to a school authority, there’s no guarantee anything will happen.

And Blackburn was a junior; although seriously out of his element at an east coast Ivy, he got as far as his junior year. If he’d been a freshman, his sudden desperation probably would have set off alarms about his failing to fit in; but he got through three years. He was close to graduation.