<p>Freshman</a> Satto Tonegawa, MIT professor's son, found dead yesterday - The Tech</p>
<p>What do all the MIT students/hopefuls think of this?</p>
<p>I knew the topic would show up here. But I don’t think it’s any different than these ones:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/2/14/chalik-adams-harvard-chaliks/[/url]”>http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/2/14/chalik-adams-harvard-chaliks/</a></p>
<p>[Harvard</a> student found dead - Local News Updates - The Boston Globe](<a href=“http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2009/05/harvard_student_2.html]Harvard”>http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2009/05/harvard_student_2.html)</p>
<p>It’s a tragedy for any community.</p>
<p>Suicides happen all over America, including MIT. Depressed people exist all over America, including MIT. MIT is an unfortunate place to be depressed. We have amazing resources available to keep these kinds of things from happening, but they still happen. It is very, very, very sad.</p>
<p>lidusha said it best.</p>
<p>Well, they never said it was a suicide. No one knows yet. (At least publicly) I think the remarkable/tragic aspect is that no one found him for a week.</p>
<p>Still, I do see people’s point that it is easy to not notice someone missing for a week, especially if you are not very close. Everyone could just assume he didn’t come to a class or club meeting, ate with someone else or somewhere else, is at the lab or library and not in his room. But still . . .</p>
<p>As an MIT parent, I’m disturbed about the particular circumstances of this case. As noted in the Tech article, “Tonegawa had not been seen for a week and an odor was noticed near his room.” Suicides are an unfortunate occurence at many campuses; the unusual factor here is that no one noticed, for the better part of a week, that anything was wrong. Our kid called earlier this evening to mention the incident, and noted that most of their friends did not think it surprising that a freshman’s death could go unnoticed for a long period; they generally agreed that if anything had happened to them as freshmen, no one would have been aware. Pretty much all of their classes as freshmen (and even as upperclassmen) were gigantic lectures where they were completely anonymous. TA’s in recitations asked no questions when students failed to appear; they just assumed that missing students were sick or had simply decided to skip class. Most of them rarely saw their GRTs, and hallmates (for those living in singles) might go weeks without running into them. Given the craziness of their schedules, even their friends (assuming that the depressed, suicidal kids in question had close friends) did not tend to think of lengthy absences as unusual. It seems that something is truly wrong with the environment at MIT if you can kill yourself, and no one even notices.</p>
<p>Lidusha mentioned that MIT has “amazing resources available to keep these kinds of things from happening.” Given the experiences of our kid and their friends, I’m not sure I would agree. Several of them have tried talking to S^3 and Mental Health services when depressed and overwhelmed. The folks at S^ 3 were friendly and willing to listen, but offered no real assistance, beyond commenting that “many people feel overwhelmed and depressed at MIT; hopefully you’ll feel better in the future.” Mental Health evidently failed to return some of these kids’ phone calls, and in other instances said that the students would need to wait several days before anyone would be available to see them.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, Satto’s suicide isn’t the first this term. In addition, a surprising number of people our kid knows have also ended up taking leaves, both voluntary and mandatory, thanks to the overwhelming level of stress at the Institute.</p>
<p>Altogether, we’re growing increasingly concerned about the environment at MIT; an apparently significant number of extraordinarily bright, promising students are being overwhelmed by the stress, the much-vaunted support systems don’t seem to be very effective, and the level of anonymity has reached the point where kids who take their own lives aren’t even noticed. Something is wrong.</p>
<p>Tonegawa lived in a dorm called MacGregor. Almost all rooms in MacGregor are singles, and, correspondingly, students at MacGregor are able to be more independent of each other than students in some other dorms. If you spend most of your time out of the dorm or with your door shut, I can see how your absence might go unnoticed.</p>
<p>Your level of independence from your peers is just one of the many things you can take into account when you choose your dorm. If you are the type of person who needs a close community you should probably be living in a dorm with a close community.</p>
<p>I live in a much smaller dorm called Random Hall. We have 90-something people total and the dorm is arranged like a house. We have eight floors: one of them has 3 people, one of them has 10 people, and the rest have 14 people. We spend most of our time hanging out in the lounges or kitchens, even if we are working on p-sets. If we are in our rooms the doors are probably all open. If for several hours anyone here is not accounted for, people start freaking out.</p>
<p>A lot of the stress at MIT is self-imposed. At the moment I feel very stressed out and quite overwhelmed. I am an admissions blogger, very dedicated to my UROP, a member of a service fraternity, socially active, and trying to double major (which sounds a lot more like a triple major–math and computer science and molecular biology–but is actually a double major) and minor. And I’m expecting it to get much, much worse in future semesters. Were I taking four classes instead of five and not involved in extracurriculars, I would be a lot less stressed out and my grades would probably be higher. But I definitely didn’t come to MIT to chillax.</p>
<p>MIT is hard. MIT is overwhelming. It’s a big part of what makes MIT MIT. You’ve probably heard snippets of the language we use, which is built around working hard and being stressed out–IHTFP (“I hate this f-ing place”/“I have truly found paradise”) reflects the love/hate relationship many students have with MIT, going to MIT is like drinking from a fire hose, hosed is overwhelmed with work, punting is procrastinating, and a lot of our parties are called study breaks. But this is all part of the experience of being at MIT. People don’t come here because they want easy classes and a small workload.</p>
<p>I also want to mention that freshman fall semester is pass/no record. There are no grades to stress over. I don’t think stress due to the workload at MIT is entirely relevant here.</p>
<p>As a former MacGregor resident, I can tell you that, as a freshman, if I had been missing for a week, people would have noticed. If I had been missing for a day, people would have noticed. And I don’t think that’s an unusual situation to be in, even in MacGregor. </p>
<p>What I personally find more troubling is that the student’s father is a professor at MIT, and he didn’t notice that his son was missing for a week. </p>
<p>I agree with lidusha. A great deal of the stress (and workload) at MIT is self-imposed. And at any rate, suicide is not caused by “stress”, but by an underlying mental health condition. Any suicide in the community is tragic, but it doesn’t seem to me that this one says something broader about conditions at MIT.</p>
<p>TechRent - I am disturbed that you come here to claim that you are a MIT parent on your first CC post and blame the MIT community. I don’t naively think everything at MIT is better than other place. However, I would rather think about something else that can ease the pain of the MIT community, at least at this moment. If you are a true parent, your input would be more valuable when you direct them to the MIT Parent Association.</p>
<p>coolweather I don’t think that is true. While I may disagree on some points TechRent made, I don’t think this is an inappropriate place to share and discuss them. Not much can be <em>done</em>, here, perhaps, but sometimes it isn’t about the doing, it’s about talking and listening together.</p>
<p>What happened is a tragedy. But I’d like to speak up for parents who honor their children’s independence – parents who don’t phone every day. When my daughter went to MIT, we agreed on a “once per week” phone call – that was her decision. Had she gone missing and no one at MIT had noticed, like the parents in this case, we would not have known for a week. </p>
<p>My daughter lived in Burton-Conner in a suite of rooms. I like to believe fellow students would have noticed had she gone missing for one or two days – but I can’t be sure. She absolutely loved everything about MIT – including the intensity. With that came stress at times. During junior year, when she was still technically a double major in engineering and physics, she had an episode of blindness during junior lab. It lasted for several hours, caused by stress. At the end of her junior year, she did admit that there were periods lasting several days at a time when her suite mates didn’t see much of her, because she was working in her room. And this from someone who was relatively social, who covered walls of the fourth floor with murals, baked cookies for everyone around, etc.</p>
<p>We don’t know the cause of death of this young man. It is heartbreaking for his family. It was heartbreaking for senior Daniel Barclay’s family when he died at MIT in 2007, and rumors circulated that his death was suicide. It turned out that his death was accidental, not suicide. In that case too, his California parents did not know anything was wrong, nor did his suite mates notice he was missing until 4 days had passed. Don’t be quick to judge anything in this case – so much is unknown.</p>
<p>As a parent, I will say that if we had the decision to make all over again, we would still fully support our daughter’s decision to go to MIT. We would still allow her independence. It was her choice to throw herself into a challenging, intense educational environment, and although sometimes she did feel, “I hate this f— place,” most of the times it was: “I have truly found paradise.” Kids grow up. They leave the nest. Some enter truly dangerous environments, like a niece of mine now in Afghanistan. That a child would die during that process of taking up an independent life is every parent’s worst nightmare, but it doesn’t mean that the parent who encouraged the son or daughter to go made a mistake. My thoughts are with the family.</p>
<p>Very sad.</p>
<p>The boy’s professor dad was out of the country at the time.</p>
<p>coolweather: Despite your skepticism, I am indeed the parent of a current MIT student. Although Ive lurked on College Confidential for several years now (ever since our child began their college search), and continue to monitor the MIT discussions on a regular basis, Ive never posted previously because my child had asked me not to. This situation, however, seemed sufficiently tragic and serious that I felt the need to comment. At my childs request, Im trying to be as vague as possible about their gender, class, dorm affiliation, etc. (Indeed, I had to create a new account last night before posting, because my kid thought my original name might reveal too much.)</p>
<p>While I appreciate the importance of young adults developing independence, I still feel that there is a problem when college freshmen can die in their rooms and remain unnoticed for almost a week. This level of anonymity is one I experienced at the graduate level, but never as an undergraduate. Our child and their friends were all discussing the incident yesterday afternoon; they were all distressed by the event, but what was surprising was that they generally felt they too would go unnoticed if something happened to them. The folks talking about it had the general impression that female students tended to speak with their parents more often than the guys did, and therefore might not go missing for quite as long without someone raising a question. Nevertheless, they did feel that at MIT in particular, pretty much anyone could slip through the cracks for quite some time, as obviously happened here.</p>
<p>As CalAlum noted, the exact nature of this students death remains to be determined. During my own undergraduate years, we had several students who committed suicide, but also one who appeared to be a suicide, but ultimately turned out to have killed themselves accidentally. (As I recall, in all of these cases the students death was discovered within 24 hours.) Regardless of the cause of Sattos death, the apparent failure of anyone to notice his absence for almost a week is a significant problem.</p>
<p>My disagreement with lidushas comments was about the effectiveness of MITs counseling services. Perhaps, if this students death turns out to have been accidental, they would have been irrelevant in this instance. However, the incident did prompt our child and their friends (who evidently assumed that this was a suicide) to discuss their experiences with S^3 and Mental Health. The issue of counseling, and the supposedly strong programs that MIT had in place, were the subject of an entire program back when we attended CPW with our kid. A number of parents had expressed concern about MITs reputation for having an unusual number of suicides. Just as has been stated in other College Confidential threads, the MIT representatives who responded noted that this was a dated stereotype from several years back, and that numerous counseling programs were in place to help prevent these tragedies, and to assist students in dealing with the stress at MIT. My point was that based on our own kids experience, as well as that of a number of their friends and acquaintances, the counseling services are nowhere near as strong as MIT spokesmen have claimed. On paper, there are numerous programs available; in practice, they are not working as well as they should.</p>
<p>As others have noted, the whole situation is incredibly tragic, and our hearts go out to Sattos family.</p>
<p>MITChris and lidusha make it sound like fears that MIT has an unusually high rate of depression and suicide are misplaced. But that’s not true. The bulk of the evidence is that MIT does have an usually high suicide rate, depression rate, and maybe most importantly doesn’t seem to care much.</p>
<p>Look, here is the bottom line. MIT is a pretty miserable place. When Elizabeth Shin died MIT did some surveys on mental health and found “74% [of students] reported having had an emotional problem that interfered with their daily functioning” ([MIT</a> Mental Health Task Force Report](<a href=“http://web.mit.edu/chancellor/mhtf/]MIT”>MIT Mental Health Task Force Report)).</p>
<p>They also made a lot of changes, discussed in that report, to mental health. They hired extra people, had walk-in hours, night hours etc. More students are now getting counseling although I don’t have numbers off-hand, although it is far from the 70%+ you would expect if they are reaching everyone who needs it.</p>
<p>In my personal experience, all after the changes were made, I think MIT is still a pretty miserable place, probably almost as bad as it was 10 years ago, although certainly not the most miserable college in America. Princeton Review does surveys on that and MIT hasn’t cracked the top 20. I don’t think the 74% number has budged much and the fact that the administration hasn’t done another survey suggests that no one cares much if it has.</p>
<p>I don’t expect it to change either. MIT doesn’t value happiness or mental health very much. MIT values working hard and technical expertise.</p>
<p><a href=“As%20I%20recall,%20in%20all%20of%20these%20cases%20the%20student’s%20death%20was%20discovered%20within%2024%20hours.”>quote</a>
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Was yours a school where everyone had at least one roommate? </p>
<p>If a student’s life is between classes and activities, it may be possible that only a roommate will notice right away if they’re gone. MIT seems to have a much larger percentage of singles than other schools I’ve seen. I consider singles a pretty good thing overall - but on the off chance that someone dies in their room, it does seem like it would make the student harder to find.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>What more should be done? Note, I don’t actually disagree with you, but I can’t think of any way to suggest fixing it - or what specifically to look for.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Do you have a source?</p>
<p>And stevewh, I do think you are massively misguided in thinking the majority experience here is misery. MIT is a tough place, and some students have mental issues that don’t make MIT any easier - but that’s no reason to believe the majority live such terrible lives. I’d really like to see something to back up your last two sentences.</p>
<p>Also, I’d like to post this entry Matt wrote a while ago:</p>
<p>[Talking</a> about a difficult subject | MIT Admissions](<a href=“http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/talking_about_a_difficult_subj]Talking”>Talking about a difficult subject | MIT Admissions)</p>
<p>I think the 74% statistic is extremely biased by the “daily functioning” part of the description. Things are time-pressured enough at MIT that you need to be in peak condition to get everything done; the slightest thing holding you back emotionally is enough to make you fall behind, and then it all starts tumbling because falling behind in classes doesn’t help with unhappiness. For example, before coming to MIT I would never have said that I’ve had an emotional problem that interfered with my daily functioning, because my daily functioning didn’t take much. I could afford to cry for a week or two about a breakup and bounce back no problem. At MIT it doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t take extreme depression to interfere with your ability to handle what is already a demanding workload. I wouldn’t say that I’ve become less of a happy person since coming to MIT. In fact, I’ve never had such a close, supportive community outside of my family, and I’ve never been more excited about what I do every day and where my life is going. But I would not hesitate to check the “has had an emotional problem that interfered with my daily life” box.</p>
<p>Matt McGann in his post claims that MIT’s suicide rate is “better than the national average.” I’m not sure what time period he means, but it certainly wasn’t better than the national average when he went there in the late 90’s. At that time, it had twice the suicide rate (suicide per # of undergrad) as the nearest school, Caltech. Over the period of 5 years, there was a suicide every semester. In the mid- to late 2000’s, suicides became much rarer I understand, but now it looks like it’s shifting back to the way it was.
Maybe he was referring to the mid-2000’s only. Or perhaps he is referring to the cohort of people age 18-22 who aren’t going to college; their rate of suicide is much higher than those in college due to different reasons, many of which are associated with poverty. If so, that would be misleading.</p>
<p>I think MIT did take steps to address the suicide issue in the early 2000’s in terms of instituting programs. However, from Techrent’s posts it sounds like they could hire better personnel. You have to be intuitive, and it can’t be a 9-5 job. You have to be committed. I don’t get the feeling like they <em>get it</em>. And it may be hard for people who have had good experiences there to empathize with those who have not have a positive experience. They may able to sympathize, but not empathize as in be able to feel the same feelings. I get the same feeling form the administration and sometimes the faculty; I don’t feel like they are really plugged in. Though they did try to improve the mental health programs, I do feel like they blamed the student body–hence, all the talk about finding “resilient” people in admissions. Instead of accepting people who got B’s in high school and didn’t care, maybe they should create a place where intense people with high standards can flourish. </p>
<p>I don’t think student monitoring could prevent anything like this from happening. However. I think improvement of the campus could help lessen the stress level. More green space for instance would help. They need to hire people who actually have talent for designing such spaces. The mayor of Cambridge actually complained in the newspaper at how unimaginative the MIT-hired urban planners were in designing and developing part of Cambridge (I forget which part all the new development took place). At one time MIT didn’t spend any money on things like aesthetics (they literally had temporary shanties housing classes and labs for 50 years until the mid-2000s). It seems now they find famous architects to create things out of Picasso painting. The goal, the only goal, should be to create buildings that people find it pleasant to work and live in. Seriously, I’ve been at second-tier state schools (not flagships) and the dorms are palaces compared to MIT’s.</p>
<p>I guess I just don’t get the implication that stress, or schoolwork, or ugly dorms cause people to commit suicide. Underlying mental health issues cause people to commit suicide – I don’t think there’s something inherent to MIT that is a fundamental issue. (One of my lab’s undergrads mentioned that there’s been an undergraduate suicide at Harvard every year she’s been here, but that Harvard is much better about leaving the public discussion of cause of death at “died suddenly”.)</p>
<p>I think it’s true that mental health services need to be excellent. I can’t really comment on the quality of mental health services at MIT, although it was certainly my impression from the mid-2000s that students felt the service was too aggressive, and that they would hospitalize people at McLean in a snap. </p>
<p>And I don’t think it would be a bad thing to have GRTs (graduate resident tutors; graduate students who live in the dorms) be a little more involved. I know that grad students at MIT are insanely busy (ask me how I know), but if they’re volunteering to live in the dorms, they should be willing to put in the time to check in with everybody in the living group. I know I had a few GRTs who were pretty hands-off, and I could go a few weeks without seeing them at all.</p>
<p>What I don’t like is the suggestion that the existence of singles for freshmen is inherently problematic. For me personally, having a single as a freshman was a great help for my mental health – I could close the door and have some alone space to myself. I needed that space as a college freshman, and I need that space as an adult. MacGregor isn’t the most popular dorm in the lottery, but it isn’t the least popular either, suggesting that Tonegawa chose to live where he did. It’s unbelievably tragic that no one knew he was dead for an entire week, but how can you force someone to be more social and extroverted than they are? TechRent, what suggestions would you make to ensure that people don’t “fall through the cracks”? I’m not sure I can think of anything that’s palatable.</p>
<p>As for the suggestion that MIT is a miserable place, I could not disagree more.</p>
<p>Green Space Helps Reduce Depression and Anxiety
A new study documents that people living close to green space have lower rates of anxiety, depression and poor physical health than those living in the concrete jungle.</p>
<p>The research, published ahead of print in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health is based on the health records of people registered with 195 family doctors in 95 practices across the Netherlands. Between them, the practices serve a population of almost 350,000. </p>
<p>[Green</a> Space Helps Reduce Depression and Anxiety | Psych Central News](<a href=“http://psychcentral.com/news/2009/10/19/green-space-helps-reduce-depression-and-anxiety/9042.html]Green”>http://psychcentral.com/news/2009/10/19/green-space-helps-reduce-depression-and-anxiety/9042.html)</p>
<h2>(caveat: this shows association, not causality, but still I think it’s a noteworthy study)</h2>
<p>[How</a> rooms and architecture affect mood and creativity | ouno](<a href=“http://blog.ounodesign.com/2009/05/02/how-rooms-and-architecture-affect-mood-and-creativity/]How”>http://blog.ounodesign.com/2009/05/02/how-rooms-and-architecture-affect-mood-and-creativity/)
How Room Designs Affect Your Work and Mood
Brain research can help us craft spaces that relax, inspire, awaken, comfort and healBy Emily Anthes</p>
<p>In the 1950s prizewinning biologist and doctor Jonas Salk was working on a cure for polio in a dark basement laboratory in Pittsburgh. Progress was slow, so to clear his head, Salk traveled to Assisi, Italy, where he spent time in a 13th-century monastery, ambling amid its columns and cloistered courtyards. Suddenly, Salk found himself awash in new insights, including the one that would lead to his successful polio vaccine. Salk was convinced he had drawn his inspiration from the contemplative setting. He came to believe so strongly in architectures ability to influence the mind that he teamed up with renowned architect Louis Kahn to build the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., as a scientific facility that would stimulate breakthroughs and encourage creativity.</p>
<p>Architects have long intuited that the places we inhabit can affect our thoughts, feelings and behaviors. But now, half a century after Salks inspiring excursion, behavioral scientists are giving these hunches an empirical basis. They are unearthing tantalizing clues about how to design spaces that promote creativity, keep students focused and alert, and lead to relaxation and social intimacy. Institutions such as the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture in San Diego are encouraging interdisciplinary research into how a planned environment influences the mind, and some architecture schools are now offering classes in introductory neuroscience.</p>
<p>Such efforts are already informing design, leading to cutting-edge projects, such as residences for seniors with dementia in which the building itself is part of the treatment. Similarly, the Kingsdale School in London was redesigned, with the help of psychologists, to promote social cohesion; the new structure also includes elements that foster alertness and creativity. What is more, researchers are just getting started. All this is in its infancy, says architect David Allison, who heads the Architecture + Health program at Clemson University. But the emerging neuroscience research might give us even better insights into how the built environment impacts our health and well-being, how we perform in environments and how we feel in environments.</p>
<p>Higher Thought
Formal investigations into how humans interact with the built environment began in the 1950s, when several research groups analyzed how the design of hospitals, particularly psychiatric facilities, influenced patient behaviors and outcomes. In the 1960s and 1970s the field that became known as environmental psychology blossomed.
…
Nature views may be more rejuvenating than urban scenes are, Sullivan adds, because humans have an innate tendency to respond positively toward naturean explanation dubbed the biophilia hypothesis. We evolved in an environment that predisposes us to function most effectively in green spaces, he says. In a December 2008 paper in Psychological Science, Stephen Kaplan also proposes that urban settings are too stimulating and that attending to themwith their traffic and crowdsrequires more cognitive work than gazing at a grove of trees does.
…
Bar provided some support for this theory in a 2007 study in which subjects again viewed a series of neutral objectsthis time while their brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging. The neuroscientist found that the amygdala, which is involved in fear processing and emotional arousal, was more active when people were looking at objects with sharp angles. The underpinnings are really deep in our brain, Bar explains. Very basic visual properties convey to us some higher-level information such as Red alert! or Relax, its all smooth; theres no threat in the area. He acknowledges that an objects contour is not the only element that informs our aesthetic preferences, and his research is still in its early stages. But all other things being equal, filling a living room or waiting room with furniture that has rounded or curved edges could help visitors unwind.</p>