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.

… more of a possibility with the death of Anthony Bourdain in France.

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Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

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A 2016 New Yorker article about the suicides of two high-profile French chefs.

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Reading and thinking about Bourdain, I find myself recalling August Kleinzahler’s comment on his wild and brilliant brother, who killed himself at 27:

He wasn’t designed for the long haul. Not everyone is.

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I am fucking furious with him.

This reaction, from one of Bourdain’s friends, rings very true to UD, since the same sort of anger was certainly her first reaction to her father’s suicide.

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In line with my two recent posts on horror:

“Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition,” wrote Graham Greene in his second autobiography, Ways of Escape, a book which the chef, author and travel show host Anthony Bourdain, who died on June 8 at 61, kept on his nightstand.

We’ve seen this before, at Caltech.

Caltech, like this school, also featured a professor’s suicide.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

[T]he Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, one of the most academically-challenging and prestigious universities in South Korea, is in the media spotlight after the suicides of four students since January, with the fourth occurring last week. And over the weekend, a KAIST professor also killed himself.

All of the Caltech students were Asian Americans.

From an article called The Urge to End It All, in the New York Times:

… What makes looking at jumping suicides potentially instructive is that it is a method associated with a very high degree of impulsivity, and its victims often display few of the classic warning signs associated with suicidal behavior. In fact, jumpers have a lower history of prior suicide attempts, diagnosed mental illness (with the exception of schizophrenia) or drug and alcohol abuse than is found among those who die by less lethal methods, like taking pills or poison. Instead, many who choose this method seem to be drawn by a set of environmental cues that, together, offer three crucial ingredients: ease, speed and the certainty of death.

… [The] tendency toward impulsivity is especially common among young people. … In a 2001 University of Houston study of 153 survivors of nearly lethal attempts between the ages of 13 and 34, only 13 percent reported having contemplated their act for eight hours or longer. To the contrary, 70 percent set the interval between deciding to kill themselves and acting at less than an hour, including an astonishing 24 percent who pegged the interval at less than five minutes.

… In September 2000, Kevin Hines, a 19-year-old college student suffering from bipolar disorder, leapt from the Golden Gate. ..[He]… is one of only 29 known survivors of the fall.

… “I’ll tell you what I can’t get out of my head,” he told me in his San Francisco living room. “It’s watching my hands come off that railing and thinking to myself, My God, what have I just done? Because I know that almost everyone else who’s gone off that bridge, they had that exact same thought at that moment. All of a sudden, they didn’t want to die, but it was too late.” …

My point is that NYU’s Bobst Library, like the Golden Gate Bridge, has unfortunately become a suicide beacon. Its creepy design, and its critical mass of student jumpers (they find attractive its high atrium overlooking a large lobby), have given it a charisma and renown.

Suicides can happen in clusters, and students sometimes imitate the methods of other students — often with striking exactitude. (Here’s a recent example of this sort of precise copying.)

If the New York Times article is right about the nature of these youthful impulsive suicides, the main thing NYU can try to do is not only make it impossible to jump from the atrium’s heights (they made it difficult, but, as this latest jumper demonstrated, not impossible), but also somehow (who knows how?) decommission the building, if you know what I mean… Do something more to its outside and inside so that it doesn’t look so much like a place you’d go to commit suicide…

A suicide cluster (seven of the deaths were suicides) emerges at North Carolina State, and the dreadful thing is that each suicide risks nudging another student on the edge over the edge. Suicide is contagious.

This is presumably (aside from privacy/family considerations) why the school fails to describe methods – you don’t want to give on-the-precipice students ideas.

 “In any community there is always a certain number of people who are on the edge, and something as emotionally charged as a suicide (or multiple suicides) in the community (especially a small community) is frequently enough to tip more of them over.“

What we do know about the school’s suicides is suggestive. Anyone who followed the male/Asian clusters at other engineering schools not that long ago will wonder about the ethnicity of some of the students at NC State/engineering who may have killed themselves.

How many were gun suicides? UD wouldn’t be surprised if it were one hundred percent. It’s North Carolina, where guns are everywhere. Guns would help account for the school’s high number: With a gun you almost never, as it were, miss. Every other method gives you a bit of a fighting chance.

As for the draining, shell-shocked sensation NC students who are watching all of this report feeling: Well yeah. Jesus.

At George Washington University, where I’m an English professor, two students have committed suicide this semester, one in January, and one last month. A third student death has also lately taken place, not yet confirmed as a suicide.

All universities tremble a little, crouch a little, when suicides happen in succession like these; administrators know about suicide clusters, the weird capacity of the act to embolden others who might be leaning toward self-destruction, and they try to heighten scrutiny – through resident assistants and the like – of their student population in the aftermath of these events. Via their president, they issue – as GW’s president did – university-wide emails that remind people to take care of themselves and each other, to reach out to people who seem troubled, to make use of campus therapists, to call the following phone number if they think they might need counseling.

I’ve read, and blogged, about university student suicides – and other kinds of suicides – for years. I’ve read Hume and Durkheim and Camus. My father committed suicide. I’m teaching modern American poetry this year, which sometimes feels like a suicide-compendium. Each morning as I walk toward the end of the Metro platform on my commute to Foggy Bottom, a sign in front of the train tunnel implores me not to throw myself on the tracks. So many hurl themselves from the Golden Gate bridge that a decision has finally been made to install a mesh net.

Suicide, especially among the promising young, always shocks us; yet it is far from uncommon. Suicide, experts say, is a very impulsive act, and the young are inclined toward impulsivity. A lot of people seem to carry suicidal thoughts around with them from day to day, but it takes a special combination of personal attributes and environmental factors to actually make it happen. Being young makes it easier to make it happen.

When I hear (usually from colleagues) about a student suicide at GW, I tend to have one immediate feeling (pity) and one immediate thought (was this one of my students?). Then my mind goes to the last minutes of the person; I can’t help imagining the silent misery and desperation surrounding the act itself. Of the student suicides that have happened during my decades at GW, I tend to think most about the undergraduate woman who took the short Metro ride across the Potomac River from her dorm room to soulless Crystal City Virginia (a stark landscape of skyscrapers and parking lots), where she checked into a hotel and killed herself. I’m not sure why her scenario in particular moves me. Maybe her final gesture of removing herself from the social and intellectual buzz of a heady urban scene to the anonymous white noise of Crystal City evokes for me the gesture of suicide itself – the impulse to deafen yourself even to the most seemingly seductive blandishments of existence.

Martin Amis, in his autobiography, Experience, writes that “the writer is the opposite of the suicide, constantly applauding life and, furthermore, creating it, assigning breath and pulse to a ‘nonexistent prodigy.'” (The last phrase is taken from The Eye, by Vladimir Nabokov.) The creative writer may indeed embody suicide’s opposite principle, but this doesn’t stop surprising numbers of literary artists from ending their lives.

We are all, if you like, literary artists every day of our conscious life, telling stories in our heads about ourselves (“God, we simply must dress the character,” Stephen Dedalus broods in Ulysses), keeping journals that plot our progress through the world. Every morning we assign breath and pulse to the self we are as we rise. My teaching life has been about sharing not just formal poetic and fictive and dramatic narratives, but asking students to think about our informal universal demand for stories from our story-tellers – a demand that starts in early childhood. As we get older, we take over the task of narrating our life story and, like Scheherazade, keeping that narrative thread going for the sake of our survival. To teach literature is mainly to deal with successful story-telling: the finished novel, the realized poem. But it is also to remind students that the content of some of that successful literature will be the failure of characters to maintain their fictions. And that the larger story of some of this art will be the personal narrative failure of its flesh-and-blood creator.

Yes, Scathing Online Schoolmarm notes that this sentence is triply redundant (unpredictable, predict, in advance), but it comes from a reasonably thoughtful consideration of suicide. I like the way the guy – a psychiatry professor – says he does understand suicide, even though the meme, the thing, the trope, the conceit, is that suicide’s all enigmatic.

Because it is at its essence a perceptual disorder, [depression] causes one to see the entire world as pain. It feels painful inside, but it also feels painful outside.

When a person is depressed, the entire world is disturbed and distressed, so there is nowhere to escape. And it is this fact that makes suicide so seductive, because it seems to offer the one available escape option.

(Go here for an elaboration on this from David Foster Wallace.)

This writer goes on to say that “the means for committing suicide should be removed from the environment.” He’s talking about the home. We can’t do much about a world brimming with suicide locations.

And yet even as we speak Cornell and NYU, who’ve had suicide clusters, are both futzing with their environment in just this way. Cornell is netting its bridges, and NYU is digitally shielding its high-atrium library.

… I didn’t know any of the students personally, but it’s still scary when this kind of thing goes on around you. And three in a few months seems like a really high number. I talked to a good friend of mine who happens to be a counselor, and he said that actually groups of suicides are a decently well understood phenomenon. In any community there is always a certain number of people who are on the edge, and something as emotionally charged as a suicide (or multiple suicides) in the community (especially a small community) is frequently enough to tip more of them over.”

———————————————–

Caltech had one student suicide in May, one in June, and one in late July. All were Asian-American men, and the second copied the first one’s method.

Long Phan, 23, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, was found dead in his rental apartment. He is the third Chinese-American student at the school to have committed suicide in the last three months. According to the World Journal, Caltech President Jean-Lou Chameau responded immediately by creating an on-campus mental health task force. According to the article, the suicides started in May, when Brian Go killed himself by helium inhalation. Hong Kong immigrant Jackson Ho-Leung Wang ended his life on June 10.

Time magazine writes:

[C]ertain sub-groups of the Asian American community have higher rates of suicide compared with the nation as a whole — in particular, older Chinese women and Asian American students.

… “Although we don’t have good statistics [yet], we believe that many Asian American students are prone to feeling depressed over a lack of achievement,” [Stanley Sue, a professor of psychology and Asian American studies at U.C. Davis] says. Getting Bs instead of As on a report card may not seem like a great sin to most students, Sue says. But in a culture and family structure where sacrifice by an older generation for the advancement — and education — of its children is a deep-seated tenet, feelings of shame for “failing” can become unbearable, Sue says, noting that this pattern is most evident in families with immigrant parents and among foreign students sent to study at U.S. universities by their families.

***************************************

UD‘s familiar with suicide clusters; her own university, GW, has had them, as has NYU. Back in 2005, two students at William and Mary killed themselves within hours of each other in exactly the same way – in a restroom, with a gun just bought at WalMart. I think only one of the students I’ve mentioned in this paragraph was Asian American. There were women as well as men among them.

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A British columnist, reflecting on the suicide of a recently graduated Oxford University student, notes that this student, like some other student suicides in English and American universities, was addicted to drugs and alcohol.

It’s difficult for universities. I think it may be easier to spot a student with, say, manic depression or schizophrenia, than to identify, and help, an “addict” – and by addict I just mean an individual whose use of substances is affecting his or her life really badly. Nearly all students drink too much and almost as many take some illegal drugs. But only a small number are driven into depression, or worse, by their drinking or drug-taking. And it’s practically impossible to spot an incipient alcoholic in an environment like a university where colossal boozing is the accepted norm.

I had a student once, a guy, in my DeLillo course. Missed a lot of classes — though he was very smart and up on the reading when he was there — and looked way unhealthy. Approached my desk at one point and shocked me with his paleness, thinness, not-thereness… Eyes jutting about. Black hair askew, heavy black earrings, wispy black t-shirt. Perfectly coherent things came out of his mouth, and, as I say, in class his comments were informed and perceptive. But there was a nobody’s-home feel to the guy for sure.

What did UD do?

Nothing. Unless you call keeping a maternal eye on the guy something. I figured he might be insulted — might see me as patronizing him… Was he, you know, just emo? Plenty of high school and university students (UD was one of them… Actually, she’s still at the stage she’s about to describe.) go through a black-suited Nietzschean thang … What if he had philosophical, aesthetic reasons for what he was doing, rather than the pathological ones I was worried about?

He did okay in the course – not as well as he could have done – and … well, here’s one thing UD did do.

The following semester, I saw him in the Starbucks across from my office. I barely recognized him — plenty of skin on his bones, a face ruddy and bright, eyes focused. I went up to him.

“You look good. That’s a relief. Last semester, you looked a bit peaked.”

“Yeah thanks I was in bad shape last semester. Got over it.”

Maybe he got over it because some other professor without all of UD‘s complexes about other people’s privacy, etc., was more aggressive with him. I don’t know. I do know that the British writer is correct when he says it’s both difficult to identify with some confidence an endangered undergraduate addict, and yet more difficult to intervene.

… Camus writes about suicide.

Although every suicide is private and enigmatic, certain types of people seem particularly susceptible. Two years ago, Cal Tech experienced a cluster of suicides among Asian American students. A writer in Time magazine notes:

[C]ertain sub-groups of the Asian American community have higher rates of suicide compared with the nation as a whole — in particular, older Chinese women and Asian American students.

Satto Tonegawa, a student at MIT, and the son of a Nobel Prize-winning MIT professor, probably committed suicide (suicide has not been officially confirmed) two days ago in his dorm room.