<p>I feel I need to do my duty as a citizen and as a human being trying to act morally to inform parents who have children enrolled in California colleges or are considering enrolling them in a Caifornia college to please take heed from the tragedy we have suffered: Our son was enrolled at the California Institute of Technology. He attempted suicide there by climbing up to the roof of one of their buildings. (Rooftop access is easily gained and parties occur there often according to one of my late son’s friends who is a graduate.) He called a friend to tell the friend that he was going to jump off the roof head first and that he wanted to die. It took his friend one and a half hours to talk my son down from the roof. When my son came down, the friend did nothing but admonish my son not to do that again. Even though the friend was a trained past president of a dorm at Caltech, he did absolutely nothing to help my son, nor did he report the attempt to anyone in authority. The next day, my son went and reported his own suicide attempt to a counselor (whom he knew from multiple counseling sessions over the course of his three years there) and to a dean, who knew intimate details of my son’s life and knew exactly why he was stressed and depressed. My son was given a crisis evaluation by a counselor who had never seen him for a session before. This psychiatrist asked my son if he wanted to go to the hospital. When he refused, she let him go back to the dorm, where the girl who had broken up with him was soon in bed with another guy across the hall from my son’s room. My son continued to go in and out of suicidal urges, and was keeping two friends of his up late talking about it. They both were stressed and went to seek help from the counseling center. When the counseling center, in one friend’s words, was not helpful, the friend called her mother, who lived locally. The friend’s mother called someone at Caltech asking them to do more, especially because she was concerned about her daughter. Throughout this period of time, at least nine people in authority knew my son had attempted suicide: two deans, two RAs, and three psychologists, including the head of the Caltech counseling center. On May 11, early in the morning, my son texted his friend and said that even though the week before he had said that he was not suicidal, that he was lying. Supposedly, the friend had her mother call again to ask them to do more to help my son. They claimed they were helping him, but they did nothing differently. A few days later, he finally completed what he had been telling people he wanted to do all along: His body was found atop yet another roof of Caltech. The friend who had talked him down from the roof during his attempt gave him his roof access card. We were never notified that our son was in any danger or had attempted suicide.
I just want to warn you parents of the sad outcome of our search for justice in this case: We filed a complaint with the California Board of Psychology. One of their agents just finished speaking with me because he said that he didn’t want me simply to receive a cold letter. He said that the psychologists from the medical board who reviewed my case were horrified and felt that the decisions Caltech and the counselor made were morally repugnant and they tried to find law that might indict her for not reporting my son’s suicidality to anyone. He told me that the case had to be closed based on insufficient evidence of misconduct because (Listen up!) THE WAY THE LAWS ARE WRITTEN IN THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA, PSYCHOLOGISTS DO NOT HAVE TO REPORT TO ANYONE IN AUTHORITY IF A PATIENT IS SUICIDAL. If a client says he or she is going to murder someone (See "Tarasoff v. ? for precedent), they are obliged. But if they want to die??? Go to California!! They don’t have to report it to anyone! He said, too, that psychologists on college campuses in California are not obliged to keep as detailed notes as psychologists outside college institutions and they are not required to diagnose. Indeed, there was not diagnosis for our son and her notes were very scanty, even though my son went to her for help off and on for much of the three years he was on campus.
If you are concerned at all about the mental health or wellbeing of your adult children while they are attending a school in California (or elsewhere–there is no uniform law requiring colleges to report a suicide attempt to parents, even though the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act allows for such notification and after the Virginia Tech incident, a federal report to then-president Bush urged clarification of such permission to notify.), have your student sign a Release of Information waiver and to note during any visits to a college counselor that in the event of a suicide attempt, that a parent be notified.
Our pain has been excruciating. I don’t want any parent to have to suffer the same fate as we, and it is my only way of trying to prevent a similar loss. Here is what Kay Redfield Jamison said in her book “Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide”: “I am often amazed at how many parents who will check into the social and athletic facilities of a college, visit the libraries and residence halls, and request the success rates of the college in getting its graduates into law school, medical school, or doctoral programs do not inquire into the quality and accessibility of its student health facilities. Counseling and psychiatric services vary enormously in quality from campus to campus, and it can be helpful to make inquiries about how well the student health center deals with students who have mental illness. It is also a good idea to obtain from the psychiatry department of the nearest teaching hospital or medical school a list of clinicials who are specialized and competent in the treatment of psychiatric disorders…the list will hopefully never be used, but getting it in advance makes sense. The same parents who have ensured that their children are educated about AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases, and drug abuse often do not discuss the symptoms of depression, an illness that is common, potentially lethat, and highly treatable. Yet only accidents are more likely than suicide to cause death in this vulnerable age group.”
…And the unluckiest parents of all (like us) are those who send off a child who seems 100% healthy when they start their freshman year, so do not think, parents, that mental illness could never happen to your child. The onset of many mental illnesses begin at 18 and the academic pressures, substance abuse, and distance from home that occur while at college can contribute to the onset or accelerate the severity of these mental illnesses. Please be warned. I pray that none of you will experience this horrible pain, and the accompanying feeling of being so betrayed by people to whom we entrusted our son.</p>
<p>Thank you for taking the time to write this painful post. I can’t begin to imagine what you’ve dealt with, but thank you for thinking of others in your difficult time.</p>
<p>Dear We Are Five,</p>
<p>My heartfelt sympathies go out to you and your family. You last paragraph touched me, since I am a mother of three, our youngest child going off to college 6 hours away in the fall.</p>
<p>We will talk to our son over the next few months and be sure he understands that it is normal for students to feel over burdened, stressed and emotional at various times during their college lives. We’ll ask him to promise to reach out to us and not feel pressured to take the stress on alone. </p>
<p>I have touched on this subject over the years, but your cc post has me realizing that the discussion needs to be strong.</p>
<p>Thank you for your efforts to reach all of us. You’re obviously a very caring person, to take time to share your thoughts in efforts to prevent someone from living through the tragedy you bare. My thoughts and prayers are with you.</p>
<p>Yes, thank you for taking the time to write this. Whenever I hear a story like this I always think to myself “those poor parents”. I know your pain is excruciating.</p>
<p>Thank you for your sympathy. I know there is much suffering in the world and many causes to which we can devote our time and attention. If I have raised the empathy of anyone here, that is a start. Next, maybe consciousness of this suffering (1,100 college-age students die each year from suicide. More could be saved.) will lead some to go to their elected representatives to change the laws in California to require therapists to report credible suicide threats. Encourage them to introduce or support bills that improve mental health services on college campuses and to disseminate to college administrators correct information on allowable parental notification in the event of a mental health emergency. Make sure students with mental illness diagnoses are not discriminated against. Fight stigma within yourself, your family, and in the wider community. Make your children aware, without shame, of any family history of mental illness and consider this information as important as sending them off to their adult lives with knowledge of their physical disease history. And if a roommate or friend attempts suicide, please have your child call 911 or take the friend to the emergency room. Stanford trains their RAs to err on the side of safety: “It is better to have someone angry and alive than dead and dead.” Or as a dean at the University of Illinois said, “I’d rather be sued for saving a kid’s life than for ignoring a kid’s life.” And my son got into Stanford, but decided to go to Caltech. Sigh. Magical thinking and “if only” gets me nowhere. And it’s no problem taking the time to write: I have my entire life to think about what might have been done differently, but I am scared enough for other parents and students to rally people to try harder to reduce the number of suicides on college campuses.
Our college kids are legally adults and many are so accomplished and wonderful and yet at such a vulnerable time in their lives. Helping them through this period is going to require some top-down changes and barring some senator’s child dying from these diseases, it’s going to take concerned ordinary citizens and empathetic people like you to save more of our precious young people. Please try, or contact people who will. Thank you.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.law.suffolk.edu/highlights/stuorgs/lawreview/documents/Gearan_Note_Final.pdf[/url]”>http://www.law.suffolk.edu/highlights/stuorgs/lawreview/documents/Gearan_Note_Final.pdf</a></p>
<p>Thank you for writing this post.</p>
<p>I’m really sorry to hear about your son. Thank you for sharing your experiences so that others may be spared.</p>
<p>[Additional</a> Stress Reduction and Prevention Resources - Stress Reduction and Management](<a href=“http://www.gulfbend.org/poc/view_doc.php?type=doc&id=15688&cn=117]Additional”>http://www.gulfbend.org/poc/view_doc.php?type=doc&id=15688&cn=117)</p>
<p>WeAreFive, I will be going off to college (University of Florida) in the Fall of 2012, four and a half hours away from my mother, who is my best friend and confidant. I am going to always remind myself to confide in my mother and others who care deeply about me if I ever even begin to feel this way. I feel nowhere near suicidal or even depressed - in fact, I am a very happy senior in high school. But I have been depressed in the past, and it is no fun. I will always keep your son’s story in mind and in my heart, because I would never want to put so many people through as much pain as you are going through right now. </p>
<p>Thank you so much for sharing your story.</p>
<p>People who commit suicide do so not because they are selfish but because the disease renders them incapable of coping with the hopelessness and pain that they feel.There are many reasons for being in such a state, and the decision to commit suicide is not one that is taken lightly. Most people are ambivalent. See this link from the National Institute of Mental Health: <a href=“http://www.nimh.nih.gov/index.shtml[/url]”>http://www.nimh.nih.gov/index.shtml</a>
You may be one of the people, mnyawn, who have experienced depression without suicidality. Not all depressed people are suicidal, but almost every person who commits suicide has an underlying mood disorder. If this is a choice, it is certainly not a rational choice. I admire your intent to take good care of yourself and to keep in touch with people you care about often while you are at college. I have heard that people with a genetic vulnerability to depression are those who suffer more than people who don’t have this genetic vulnerability when there is a loss of any kind in their lives. So take particularly good care of yourself after any kind of loss: from a bad grade to being humiliated somehow to a romantic breakup, etc. Talking to a mental health counselor you trust (usually off campus is better–colleges don’t seem to have the funding for good mental health care–on most campuses). Take care and you are welcome, and thank you for your kind words to me. The terrible pain has eased with time and the kindness of people like you.</p>
<p>The National Alliance on Mental Illness is an EXCELLENT resource. [NAMI:</a> National Alliance on Mental Illness - Mental Health Support, Education and Advocacy](<a href=“http://www.nami.org/]NAMI:”>http://www.nami.org/)</p>
<p>They offer support groups for ill people as well as for family members. I just completed a 12-week course for family members. Each class was 2 1/2 hours. We were given material each week that ended up filling a big binder. A young woman with bipolar disorder came and spoke to us so we would understand things from her perspective. We learned about the causes of illness as well as treatment and medication. It was as intense as a college class.</p>
<p>I am currently reading an excellent book about suicide, “Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide.” Here is the link: [Amazon.com:</a> Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide (9780375401459): Kay Redfield Jamison: Books](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Night-Falls-Fast-Understanding-Suicide/dp/0375401458]Amazon.com:”>http://www.amazon.com/Night-Falls-Fast-Understanding-Suicide/dp/0375401458)</p>
<p>The author, Kay Redfield Jamison, is a JHU psych prof who suffers from bipolar disorder and has been suicidal at times through her life. She does a good job of describing the despair that mentally ill people go through. She and a close, close friend actually made a pact to contact the other if he or she were considering suicide. Even as she was making the deal, she realized it probably wouldn’t work. Sure enough, years later, her friend killed himself without ever calling her.</p>
<p>I have two sons, aged 16 and 19, whom this book applies to. I’m scared out of my wits. They’re both living at home and receiving therapy and medication. The younger one called the crisis help line the other night. They had a stable upbringing with lots of love, so this is hard to understand. The NAMI class helped me understand that they suffer from a real ILLNESS, and it wasn’t my fault or my husband’s.</p>
<p>At Thanksgiving dinner, we each mentioned something we were thankful for. My older son said, “I’m thankful that I’m safe and at home.” Amen!</p>
<p>Excellent resources. Kay Redfield Jamison is firmly entrenched in my personal pantheon of secular saints! I admire her so much. Robert Sapolsky at Stanford is another scientist I admire. He has devoted his professional life to studying the effects of stress in primates and humans. I’ve already linked to a lecture of his on depression in another thread, but you can find more by him on You tube.
It sounds as if you are doing all the right things for your sons. A friend of mine told me that she thought the world was very different nowadays than it was for us and from when we attended college. She said she heard that only a third of our 18-year-olds are ready, both academically and emotionally, to attend college away from home now. I think our generation of parents on average has sort of fetishized the college experience and especially the bragging rights of having our offspring go to an elite university. Not all, but many. In the UK, there is what is known as a gap year, during which students explore activities of interest to them, whether near home or abroad. I think this might become a more appealing route for some who just need a few more years of maturation. Also, the major mental illnesses tend to manifest beginning at 18, precisely the time when a college freshman is also confronted with a lot of major stressors by going off to university. Even though the suicide rate for that age cohort is higher for non-college-attending students than for those who are attending colleges, the non-disclosure stance of some universities (like my son’s) and the pitiful mental health care available on many campuses makes going off to college riskier for those predisposed to mental illness. That said, if a child has been diagnosed and is stable on medications before entering college, the structure and challenge of college can be better for them than being at home, and there are colleges that do provide good services to help students with mental illness survive and thrive while there. I feel the need for a guidebook for just which colleges in the country these are. Can I persuade “US News and World Report” ever to give a ranking of colleges based on how well they take care of students with diagnosed mental illnesses or which colleges notify parents when there is a suicide attempt on campus? I think that would be a wonderful resource. Our kids aren’t just academic automatons–they have emotions, strong ones at that age, and with brains that are not fully matured and more highly impulsive than at any other time in their lives. Yet they are also trying to break away from parents and become independent–a very tough age.
Regarding your sons, I am glad they realized what was happening to them early on. The earlier the intervention, the better the outcome. Not being ashamed is a huge first step. Managing the condition will ensure they live fully functional lives. I am very happy that you posted this success story and very, very happy, too, that your sons are alive and well.</p>
<p>I also benefitted a lot from reading Andrew Solomon’s “The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression.” Both he and Kay Redfield Jamison are excellent writers. They make a subject many would like to turn away from fascinating and readable. A reviewer said of the book, “Solomon interweaves a personal narrative with scientific, philosophical, historical, political, and cultural insights…The result is an elegantly written, meticulously researched book that is empathetic and enlightening, scholarly and useful…Solomon apologizes that ‘no book can span the reach of human suffering.’ This one comes close.” (Christine Whitehouse, ‘Time’) You and your family will be in my thoughts, Maine Longhorn.</p>