The Sunday Read: ‘The Unthinkable Mental Health Crisis That Shook a New England College’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 11 February 2024

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

The first death happened before the academic year began. In July 2021, an undergraduate student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute was reported dead. The administration sent a notice out over email, with the familiar, thoroughly vetted phrasing and appended resources. Katherine Foo, an assistant professor in the department of integrative and global studies, felt especially crushed by the news. She taught this student. He was Chinese, and she felt connected to the particular set of pressures he faced. She read through old, anonymous course evaluations, looking for any sign she might have missed. But she was unsure where to put her personal feelings about a loss suffered in this professional context. The week before the academic year began, a second student died. A rising senior in the computer-science department who loved horticulture took his own life. This brought an intimation of disaster. One student suicide is a tragedy; two might be the beginning of a cluster. Some faculty members began to feel a tinge of dread when they stepped onto campus. Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts is a tidy New England college campus with the high-saturation landscaping typical of well-funded institutions. The hedges are beautifully trimmed, the pathways are swept clean. Red-brick buildings from the 19th century fraternize with high glass facades and renovated interiors. But over a six-month period, the school was turned upside down by a spate of suicides.

Transcript

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0:00.0	My name is Jordan Kistner. I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine
0:06.9	and I've been teaching writing to university students for most of the last 10 years.
0:11.2	This week's Sunday Reed is my story for the magazine about a
0:15.8	cluster of suicides that struck a small university in Massachusetts between
0:20.5	2021 and 2022.
0:23.0	I wrote about how the mental health crisis among college-age students
0:27.0	is affecting the staff who teach and care for them
0:30.0	and how it's shaping the broader institution of college in the United States.
0:35.0	So in the summer of 2021, students at Worcester Polytechnic Institute,
0:42.0	which is a STEM-focused university of about 5,000
0:45.1	undergraduates, received an email from their administration. A rising senior had
0:51.4	died and the Boston Globe leader reported it as a suicide.
0:56.5	Then a few days before classes started, news of a second suicide appeared in the students'
1:02.3	inboxes. And then by the end of September, a third.
1:08.7	It was every academic institution's worst nightmare, a row of self-inflicted student deaths,
1:15.0	proceeding more or less with one death a month for six months.
1:20.0	The students who took their lives hadn't really shown any of the conventional warning signs.
1:26.0	There was this helpless feeling among professors.
1:30.0	Any of their students could be at lethal risk and they might not know.
1:35.0	And one terrifying aspect of a suicide cluster like this is that you never know if another death is coming or when.
1:43.0	And so the university's president at the time formed a task force that would evaluate
1:49.0	in as data-based away as possible what factors might be contributing to this mental health emergency.
	...

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