I want to start a discussion that will, hopefully, lead to some changes in communication.
There were two deaths at Yale last week. We all got that somber letters from Dean Holloway. Our kids talk, and soon we were finding out that those deaths were suicides. I am not trying to blame Dean Holloway or Yale specifically, but please, let’s talk openly about it. Suicide should be called suicide , not a tragic death or an accident. We need to demystify suicide the same way we demystified cancer. We need to acknowledge that mental illness is illness, the same way our gallbladders or kidneys get sick. I am sick and tired of this. Could Yale possibly lead a crusade, acknowledging that suicide happens and could we please start talking openly about this?
I think this is an important discussion, and I cannot overstate how upset those emails made our entire family. Howver, I personally do not think it is Yales place to state that a death was a suicide out of respect for the families of the students. The students in both cases were named and I do not think its the place of the University to call it suicide. Having said that, I think its an important issue and needs to be addressed, just not in the context of the death of a specific student.
While I don’t think details should ever be shared, I think that it’s OK to say the student “died by suicide.” At my 20-year-old nephew’s funeral, his father said we have to talk about “the elephant in the room” and admit that suicide is a problem. Word is going to get out, anyway, so I think it’s better to be upfront about it.
@MaineLonghorn That is certainly a valid point of view. Im just not sure the University should state the cause of death of any student against the wishes of that students family. There are a lot of cultural, and honestly personal, issues involved with suicide. While I understand that in many ways the point of stating it was a suicide is to break through those issues and foster conversation, it just strikes me as rather callous to make a “talking point” of the death of a student or to ask their family members permission at a time like that. No matter how well intentioned the effort.
It’s really up to the families to decide what they want to disclose.
Maybe it’s better to discuss the pressure the kids may have felt that led to their deaths. Elsewhere on this forum, there’s a thread about the jump in suicide rates among middle school kids. Still elsewhere, parents say that they place their kids on anti-anxiety meds and then in the same post on this Forum to see how they, the parents, should handle the kids dropped senior grades. Maybe the parents are the ones who need the chill pill and to realize that YHStanfordPrinceton and the like don’t equal happiness?
Maybe it’s time for parents to calm the heck down and let their kids be.
Here’s a thought: Maybe let the kids mess up a few grades. Maybe let them not do well in high school. What’s the downside again?
I’ll tell you what it is because that’s what we are doing right now: There is no downside. So far our child is enjoying – actually enjoying – doing what he likes. Joy has returned to his life now that he’s out of school. He’s exploring things that actually interest him.
Will he be a bum the rest of his life? I don’t think so. Time will tell, but he’s got a family behind him who can help him understand how to navigate the world once he decides his direction. College is out there waiting for him. He will get fine college someday, if he wants.
And that’s the key: If HE wants, not if his mom and dad want. He will be invested in his progress more fully if and when he decides to go back to college.
There are numerous amazing colleges that look for and welcome older students. He’s lost zero opportunities. And is probably in the process of creating additional ones for himself, ones that make him happy.
I agree, the institution shouldn’t be in the position of disclosing the information. Yale did the right thing.
I dont want to chime in too much but this is a very important issue to me, as Im sure it is to every parent. Pressure is a fact of modern life. None of these young adults would be at Yale without pressure. Not that being at Yale is the end all, its not. In my case the pressure applied was internal, it came from my son himself. Im sure every parent says that and even believes it is true. Im as faulty at appraising the truth as anyone else, I ask myself all the time whether I put pressure on my son. I find it hard to answer conclusively. What I do know know is that he is a very tightly wound person and from a very early age has been driven along a certain path. Is he happy? I dont think so, and that makes me very sad. Is it what I know he wants to do? Of that I have no doubt. The best I can do is a parent, I think, is to give him unconditional love and let him know that he always has someone to talk to. But the pressure isnt going away, a least not anytime soon.
Here’s the thing: it seems that whenever a college student (or high school student for that matter) commits suicide, there is automatically an assumption made that that young person did so because of pressure. But really, we have no way of knowing what drove a person to suicide unless we were close to that person - and maybe not even then.
It is the decision of the family and they should not be “shamed” into revealing cause of death for the benefit of discussion.
The cause of the death should be disclosed only if the family decides to do so. All we need to do is to pray for the families.
@Dustyfeathers
I applaud your support of your son and agree our youth are under more pressure than ever but I’d caution you to not connect the two suicides at Yale to anything indicative of the college experience at the universities you listed. There is always more to the story than we on the outside are privy to and by falling into the convenient narrative of “over stressed elite school kid succumbs to the pressure” you run the risk of missing the bigger picture.
I work at a middle school and last year we had a 7th grader take his life. It was too painful to imagine but he wasn’t under some horrific academic pressure. This year a local HS teen took her life. Again the pressure to be an over achiever was NOT a factor.
We need to broaden the discussion so that any child/young adult/adult who needs help feels safe to do so.
Mental health is a health issue and should be supported as any other health issue.
Gosh, this is so hard to hear… just last week a close friend of mine committed suicide. We’re both high school seniors and she was going through the entire application process. In my opinion there is no worse feeling than losing someone to suicide, it’s the worst pain I’ve ever felt. So at this time I’d imagine that many Yale students right now are in a vulnerable place as well. I totally agree that mental illness should be more heavily researched and openly discussed, but I think that the time immediately following is too sensitive to have those conversations. I think that academic pressure has everything to do with the suicide of those Yale students and of my friend as well. In the case of my friend, I had only talked with her two nights before about college, and she revealed to me the amount of stress that she was feeling from the combination of college applications and schoolwork. I tried to comfort her, and looking back I know there was something more that I could have done 
But this is a high school student, I can’t begin to imagine the pressure that someone would feel at a school like Yale, where even genius’ can be easily overshadowed by their peers.
I would like to stress , that this is a general discussion, I do not believe that the phenomena is confined to Yale and it is certainly not confined to college students. I really do not think that academic pressure is the main culprit. I think that it is the way in which our world is going, pressure to achieve better and better, to have more and more. We are simply not happy just doing our best, be it bread making or car repair, brain surgery or carpet weaving. This leads to stress, mental illness . And we are ashamed to talk about mental illness. This is the single thing that needs to change. Why are we judged negatively for having anxiety and not for having arthritis ?
I’m going to chime in and say unequivocally that it must be the parents decision on whether to disclose the death as a suicide. There could be legal and insurance repercussions to suicide and the family needs to sort that through first.
@Monarch24 I obviously don’t know your exact circumstances, but I feel I must say that although it’s really difficult to believe now, there was nothing more you could have done. I’m sure there will be plenty of devastated people around your friend who are all feeling the same thing but in the end it was her decision.
Please make sure you have the support you need at this time because your mental health is now a priority. As others have mentioned, if your friend had broken a leg then it would have been visible and adults who can deal with it would have taken over, helping mend the break and taking over the practicalities of looking after everyone. The same isn’t always true for mental illness and it’s often necessary for the one involved to shout loudly that they need support, which isn’t normally the nature of the illness.
You, your friend’s family and other friends will be in my prayers.
@Monarch24 I was the last one to talk to a friend that took his own life when I was in HS. He did it within an hour of me getting off the phone with him. I had no warning, there was no sign that he would do that and he left no note. It was devastating. There are no answers, there is no room for the “what if”. It was a choice. It wasn’t your choice. It wasn’t your fault. You need to come to terms with that as hard as that may seem. I’m sorry you are hurting. I would not wish that for anyone but I understand.
There’s a thoughtful feature in the Yale Daily News today discussing the issue of students receiving appropriate care and attention following reinstatement after withdrawal for mental health reasons. One of the recent deaths is discussed. It seems clear that reintegrating students successfully (which is what everyone wants) can be challenging for the students themselves (each of whom has a unique situation), the administration and the college community. The article is here: http://features.yaledailynews.com/blog/2016/11/15/after-reinstatement-what-next/
I want to challenge the automatic notion that it’s solely the family’s decision whether to identify a death as a suicide. Deaths in a college community affect many people besides the family, and I don’t think it’s appropriate to “privatize” disclosure decisions to that extent. What’s more, invariably multiple people in the college community have a great deal of information about what happened – sometimes more than the family – so information gets disseminated by informal means, and ultimately discredits official communications that are not realistic.
Lets put aside the deeply personal issues here (alchoholism, child abuse in the family) and just put it on a religious level. Suppose a student is Muslim or Hindu (two among many religions that consider suicide a sin) and comes from a very religious family. Is it really acceptable for Yale, or anywhere else, to publicize to that community that this young adult committed a sin and thus shame the family? I think that in the age of the internet as well as heightened sensitivity to other cultures that that is not acceptable. I think that community supersedes the four years or so that a person may spend at a particular institution. Id be interested to hear a criticism of that because I do think that this is an important issue and one worthy of discussion.
I’m not an expert on the legal issues, but virtually every university student is legally an adult and therefore the university doesn’t really have obligations to their families apart from common courtesy and humanity, it seems to me. This is why the students have to give their parents permission to see their grades, term bills and health records. On the other hand, the university has clear duties to the other members of its community (students, faculty, staff). I think the administration is bound to act in the best interests of the members of its community, and that might mean making greater disclosure even if doing so would be hurtful to the family. I wouldn’t want to have to make that call, though.
Bear in mind also that the administration undoubtedly knows much more about each situation than has been publicly disclosed, and therefore we’re evaluating their decisions without full knowledge.