Recent suicides at Yale College

JHS
Tue, 15 Nov 2016 20:53:37 +0000

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.