Ordinary People

Deaths have explanations to fill the voids they leave. Suicides are different.

The suicide of Chang H. Jo '00 before spring break is very painful and the impulse to blame Harvard's indifferent support network is strong. This institutional critique, however, masks the deeper attitudinal problem that isolates suicides as fringe events committed by disturbed persons. By refusing to acknowledge just how ordinary suicides and their victims are, we--administrators and students--make their occurrence more likely.

First, the institutional problems. Although the suicide rate at Harvard has remained fairly constant over the last 15 years, the temptation to accept its occurrence as inevitable is wrong. The statistics do not prove Harvard's success in preventing further suicides but rather its failure in reducing them.

At other universities, open lines among deans, health services and proctors, along with detailed disclosure protocols have reduced the number of suicides. The Brown Daily Herald last year reported only one suicide at Columbia University in six years, seven at Brown in 20 years, and none at Princeton in many years. The Crimson has reported 11 suicides at Harvard in the last four years.

Chang's death will spur the University Health Services (UHS) and the House to organize counseling sessions and put more mental health professionals on call over the next few weeks. That is fine, except that the availability of mental health services will flag in proportion to the publicity surrounding the suicide so that when student need help months later, they often cannot get it.

"Erin," a senior in Quincy House, came close to poisoning herself one night. "I had lined up all these pills and was playing with an empty glass. I was trying really hard not to fill it up with water." But when, later, she tried talking to UHS, she was told to wait eight days for an appointment. Erin said that was a slap in the face.

Just before break, the University let "Sarah" move off-campus, a decision her roommates feel was a terrible one, because it will isolate her even further. "I spoke to my tutor about her," said Sarah's roommate. "You know what he said? "Thanks for your concern.' That was the end of it."

Of course many students have found adequate help from professionals both at UHS and the Bureau of Study Counsel. But because institutionally, these offices are so disjoined from one another and from the Tutor's office, entering the support system is difficult. A month before Dominic J. Amijo '95 hanged himself, he tried killing himself at home, but the psychiatrist affiliated with Harvard had not informed the House masters. This fragmented support network needs to be fixed.

My criticism, however, is not primarily institutional. Harvard can and must do better, and not just over the next few weeks. The flawed support network is merely a symptom of a deeper attitudinal problem that both we and the university carry.

The knee-jerk reaction to suicide is for students and administrators to convince themselves that any suicide is an aberration that suicide happens only to mal-adjusted loners. But this attitude is the problem. Suicides happen to athletes like Annelle Fitzpatrick '00, and musicians like Katherine L. Tucker '94. They happen to David Okrent '99, Benjamin R. Hanson '97-'98, Jason D. Altom and Ansgar Hansen '97. Suicides are ordinary events that happen to ordinary people. To brand suicides, suicidal tendencies or feelings of depression as inherently abnormal and to ostracize their occurrence from the mainstream the way one removes a malignant tumor reinforces the mentality that causes them in the first place.

This attitude is the cause of the more troubling tendency for the University indiscriminately to tell depressed students to "take time off" and that they are not fit as students. "They see time off as the fix to everything," says a junior who has survived an attempt. "Time off" deprives depressed students both of the already tenuous support system of friends and services that they have here and the incentive to admit to personal problems.

At Harvard, the glorification of what Ralph Waldo Emerson calls the "self-helping man" whom "all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire," blinds us to individual weakness. According to UHS, 15 percent of undergraduates use mental health services at least once during their college years. According to the National Institutes of Mental Health, about 25 percent of all women and ten percent of all men will suffer from depression. But bravado makes us unwilling to acknowledge that. Consequently, students becomes less willing to share personal failures and listeners less willing to accept them.

"Jesse," a firs year who has also considered suicide, writes, "In a place where I feel that people try to pretend that they're on top of the world, it's awful hard to tell even a close friend, Look, a lot of the time, I'm unhappy.' Several people in my entryway had dealt with depression this year also, and none of us ever talked about it or tried to help each other in any way."

Stigmatizing suicides makes their occurrence more likely. By relegating suicide to the realm of the abnormal and the incomprehensible, we deny that the victim was ordinary like us. But by doing so, we stigmatize our own feelings of depression and clam up, alone and unheard.

Why did Chang kill himself? We will probably never know. But what we do know is that we're not perfect. Beneath our tough veneer, we are frail. We are, after all, ordinary people and these are ordinary times.

Alexander T. Nguyen '99 is a social studies concentrator in Pforzheimer House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.