u*****a
发帖数: 6276 | 1 Fifth suicide since last school year.
宾夕法尼亚大学的生物化学系华裔学生胡阿曼达(Amanda Hu，音译)，28日深夜被发现
猝死在宿舍。尽管初步迹象指向自杀，但现场的离奇血迹使得本案扑朔迷离。目前凶案
组正调查本案，死因仍需尸检确定。
费城警方在30日表示，来自北卡夏洛特的阿曼达年仅20岁，是宾大二年级学生，日
前已主动向校方申请休学，以便腾出时间在生物化学实验室工作。她与其他至少六名女
生在校外分租住宿。28日晚11时30分左右，警方在大学城(University City)Sansom街
与40街附近一座民宅的二楼卧室，发现躺在地上一动不动的阿曼达。她的口鼻仍有血液
冒出的痕迹，身旁的墙壁上也有一滩血迹。
费城新闻网“Philly”报道，警方发现阿曼达手中“握着头发”，还发现一个装抑
郁药丸的空瓶，以及两份看似遗书的信。一封写给她的家人，另一封写给她在宾大的心
理健康医生。
阿曼达的室友表示曾在案发前听到她房里传来尖叫和巨响，但不能确定声音由谁发
出，而且房间没有强行闯入的痕迹。还有人透露，据称是阿曼达男友的男子曾在稍早猛
敲她的房门。
Hu was a star student at Providence High School in Charlotte and a member of
the National Honor Society. In 2012, the Charlotte Observer named Hu as one
of 10 regional high school seniors of the year.
At Penn, she participated in Model Congress, Youth for Debate, and Science
Across Ages.
[Update 1:33 p.m.] The Daily Pennsylvanian is identifying the deceased
student as Amanda Hu, 20, from a suburb of Charlotte, N.C.
“She had left what appeared to be two suicide notes: one addressed to her
family and one to her ‘mental health doctor at Penn,’” the DP reported.
“The exact cause of death has yet to be confirmed by the Medical Examiner’
s office as of Monday morning.”
A gathering for Hu will be held at 5 p.m. today in the Benjamin Franklin
Room in Houston Hall, the paper reported.
And as HughE Dillion reports below in the comments, this weekend features a
suicide awareness walk, starting 7:30 a.m. Sunday at the Philadelphia Art
Museum.
[Original] A female Penn student in her 20s was found dead overnight, the
victim of an apparent suicide. Authorities did not immediately identify her.
NBC 10 reports: "Philadelphia Police investigated the apparent suicide
inside a row home on the 4000 block of Sansom Street in University City.
Investigators said that they found a female student in her 20s dead in her
bedroom late Sunday night. The woman left a note at the scene, according to
police."
This would appear to be at least the fifth suicide at Penn since the
beginning of last school year. The university has expanded its counseling
outreach and commissioned a task force focusing on student mental health.
Recommendations from that task force are due by the end of the semester.
For confidential support if you are having thoughts of suicide, call the
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255). Learn about
the warning signs of suicide at the American Foundation for Suicide
Prevention. | u*****a
发帖数: 6276 | 2 下面是有关本年初宾大的另一位自杀学生的文章。
Doors were beginning to open for Madison Holleran. She racked up straight As
, ran track, and pushed her Northern Highlands Regional High School soccer
team to two New Jersey state championships. As she entered her junior year
in 2011, Lehigh University soccer coach Eric Lambinus became a regular at
her matches. Lambinus hoped to recruit Holleran as his center-midfielder,
the most physically taxing and important position in his system. “What
impressed me about Maddy,” he says, “is that she was exceptionally skilled
in the fundamentals. She was very good, and she made the players around her
better.”
At home, Holleran mothered her siblings. On the field, she led without
seeming to try: first downfield to hug a teammate who scored, chattering to
keep everyone’s energy up. Lambinus admired Holleran’s easy charisma,
watching as even his Lehigh squad — college students — gravitated toward
the younger girl when she arrived from Allendale, New Jersey, on visits. He
also noticed something else: “You could just see, in social situations, her
being very aware of the other girls’ reactions,” he says. “She seemed to
need approval. But you figure that’s something to work on.”
Lambinus thought he had a good shot at recruiting Holleran. But during her
senior year, competition emerged. Holleran was also a standout middle-
distance runner, and Harvard’s track program flew her to Boston, took her
to dinner and gave her a tour of the campus.
“What would you think about my playing soccer, too?” she asked.
These were words no track coach longs to hear. Harvard never made an offer.
But the University of Pennsylvania called.
Lambinus says Holleran seemed particularly troubled by selecting a school.
Though she offered Lambinus a verbal commitment — “I think she was very
comfortable with Lehigh,” he says — she still appeared “unsteady” about
the choice.
Lehigh offered the small, bucolic environment she enjoyed in high school,
and soccer, the sport she loved most. But what kid knows herself so well
that she can announce, at 18, to parents, relatives and friends, that she’s
choosing personal happiness, the safer option, over a shot at big-time Ivy
League success?
“Could you stop with the drama?” Holleran would say every time her little
sister acted like the sky was falling. She was always the mature one, the
young girl with an adult’s capacity to plan. So whatever pressure she felt
along the way, when Holleran pulled out of Lambinus’s program and chose
Penn, the moment looked like a triumph. Holleran went Ivy, accepting a
reward commensurate with her young life’s achievement.
What shocked everyone is what happened next. On January 17, 2014, just as
her second semester got under way, Madison Holleran trekked about a mile and
a half from Penn’s campus to Center City and killed herself. Her death was
one of five among the Penn student body in six months’ time, including
four confirmed suicides. The tragedies cast a sudden pall over Penn’s image
as a dream destination for every high-achieving kid and his or her parents.
Criticism centered on Penn’s notoriously competitive student culture and
understaffed mental health services. But the question raised by the Penn
suicides is broader and more fundamental than any campus policy, reaching
into every home where parents send their sons and daughters off to college
with big dreams and bright futures:
Why would these kids — top of their class, the elite, bound for success —
choose to kill themselves?
The search for answers, and potential remedies, suggests a radical shift —
a new way of looking at suicide, our children and ourselves; a more honest
way of handling a problem we usually treat with silence. | u*****a
发帖数: 6276 | 3 WE SPEAK SO LITTLE OF SUICIDE that the issue might seem esoteric. But
according to survey data by suicide experts, about 10 percent of the country
’s college students think about killing themselves (what health
professionals call “suicidal ideation”) at some point in their college
careers. Almost one percent make an attempt. If these numbers sound small,
do the math: Penn has about 24,000 students, meaning that roughly 2,400 of
them will suffer so profoundly from a sense of pain or depression that they
’ll consider killing themselves; within that group, 240 students will make
an attempt.
The biggest dangers are neurobiological: The human brain isn’t fully
developed until we are about 25 years old, particularly in regions
associated with impulsivity and emotional regulation. In this context, even
a healthy kid is likely to struggle with transitioning from the childhood
home to whatever comes next. Now consider that mental illness often first
manifests itself between ages 16 and 25.
The risk is clear. But what happened at Penn recently still surprises:
Last August, the death of 24-year-old Wendy Shung, a popular graduate
student and resident adviser whose kids called themselves “Wendy’s Wolf
Pack,” was declared a suicide.
Pulkit “Josh” Singh, a 20-year-old engineering and Wharton business-school
junior, was found dead on January 12th in an apartment he rented off campus
. Speculation over his cause of death continued until a city health
department official deemed it an accidental drug overdose in April.
Holleran took her own life five days later. Over Thanksgiving break, she
told her parents she had contemplated suicide. Her father told the New York
Post that she’d been happy in high school but that after going to Penn she
had “worries and stress.”
• Sophomore Elvis Hatcher, 18, hung himself in his fraternity house on
February 3rd, and later died in the hospital. He first confessed suicidal
thoughts to his parents at age 15, and had been in treatment ever since.
• Almost two months after Hatcher’s suicide, the public learned of a
fourth — Alice Wiley, a graduate student in social policy who died over
winter break, just before the New Year.
Mental health experts say suicide never results from one fight, one
conversation, one lost job. More likely, a person struggles against some
preceding, often untreated mental illness, like depression. Then a series of
stressors adds weight until the inexplicable happens. In this formula, no
one burden — be it college, Ivy League or otherwise; family and
relationship problems; drug and alcohol use — is to blame any more than
others. “I think one of the things we struggle against in the world of
suicide prevention,” says Christine Moutier, chief medical officer with the
American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, “is that we’re always trying
to explain it. We’re always asking, ‘Why? How could someone do this?’ But
there’s not one explanation.”
Moutier and other experts maintain, however, that despite suicide’s myriad
causes, prevention is possible. Between 1990 and 2010, suicide rates dropped
slightly among adolescents, according to statistics from the Centers for
Disease Control. And in a sense, academic success is protective — kids who
don’t attend college are twice as likely to die by suicide as those who do.
Still, the four suicides at Penn in just six months are cause for
reflection on the pressure today’s highest achievers are under: to ace the
toughest available courses; excel at sports; join extracurricular clubs; and
then find time on the weekends to volunteer.
These overscheduled kids strive for perfection, spending their adolescence
collecting medals, first-place finishes and congratulatory handshakes. But
when they arrive at Locust Walk, they are suddenly surrounded by thousands
of peers who were also the smartest and best. They experience failure,
perhaps for the first time in their lives. They feel like they are letting
down their families. And just as they are beginning to gather power in the
world, they might be at their most vulnerable. | u*****a
发帖数: 6276 | 4 MADISON HOLLERAN’S FIRST SEMESTER at Penn was tough, despite her 3.5 GPA.
She had a big, close social circle in high school, a support system built
from childhood. That chapter of Holleran’s life can still be seen online —
playing sports, singing with friends, dancing with her old teammates on a
hotel bed.
Those bonds aren’t forged overnight at a new school. But Holleran was
probably a lot more popular in college than she believed. The new friends
she made remember her stopping, repeatedly, anywhere she walked, to say
hello to people she knew. Later, media coverage would fixate on her looks —
her thin frame, delicate features and joy-bomb smile. Her track teammates
simply thought she was relaxed and confident.
“She was just one of those people who had an effortless glow about her,”
says Lauren Murphy, a fellow runner. “She did everything with elegance and
grace.”
Holleran did confide in a couple of new friends. She told Ashley Montgomery,
another freshman on the track team, that Penn wasn’t what she’d hoped.
Running track wore on her. She missed her pals back home. She talked, a lot,
about what she wanted from life — a home in California, maybe, and plenty
of outdoor time. “It sounds funny to say, but she was very serious about
being happy,” says Montgomery. “She’d try to figure out what happiness is
, like a formula, and she’d get really analytical.”
Holleran and Montgomery ran together, frequently, through the city. Holleran
often paused to take pictures of pretty views. On a fall evening, after
track, Holleran hauled Montgomery to the top of Franklin Field. The sunset
cascaded before them, swirls of orange and pink decorating the sky. At the
time, Montgomery considered the constant picture-taking an eccentricity.
Later, Montgomery came to believe that for Holleran, happiness was “more a
thought than a feeling” — something she caught sight of, outside herself,
and tried to capture before it disappeared.
LIZZY HATCHER REGISTERED the sound, buzzing through her sleep.
The phone.
She could feel her husband, Kevin, rouse beside her. And as the world around
her came into focus — still dark, phone ringing — she could feel fear,
like a flatworm, twitch and curl in her stomach.
She remembers only the key words the doctor told her husband: “Son. Elvis.
Attempted suicide. Critical.” From there, her every act — sitting up in
bed, putting her feet to the floor, standing — felt unreal. The university
arranged travel from Florida, but snow in Philadelphia forced an agonizing
series of delays at the airport. “It was just an awful, awful day,” she
says. “Such a helpless feeling.”
By the time the Hatchers landed, it was after 9 p.m. Someone from Penn —
Hatcher doesn’t remember who — picked them up and drove them straight to
the hospital. Elvis was already on life support. “The next morning,” says
Hatcher, “he passed away.”
Hatcher posts on Facebook regularly, intermixing fond remembrances of Elvis
with exhortations on treating depression. She speaks proudly of her son — a
multi- instrumentalist and dancer with a furious wave of curly hair who
loved wearing bow ties. He’d made friends at Penn and joined a fraternity.
But over the course of multiple phone conversations, her voice weakens. “
Life is just … so different now,” she says. “We just try to get through
the day.”
Two days after Hatcher’s death, Penn acted swiftly, announcing the hiring
of three new mental health counselors at Counseling and Psychological
Services, or CAPS, and, weeks later, the formation of a Task Force on
Student Psychological Health and Welfare. Penn president Amy Gutmann wrote
about the changes in a university-wide email, simultaneously touting the
expansion of services and denying any connection between the counseling
center and the suicides.
“While all evidence indicates that the recent student deaths are unrelated
to each other,” she wrote, “and certainly unrelated to the work done at
CAPS, we know that the needs of the community are placing greater than ever
demand on our valuable student support teams.”
In the same memo, Gutmann noted that in the past eight years, CAPS had grown
its senior staff by 10. The message struck some as cold politicking when a
tender hand was needed; in one line, Gutmann used the acronym “FTE” to
denote the hiring of “Full Time Employees.”
“I think the whole response just reflected a kind of corporate mind-set,”
says Toorjo Ghose, a member of Penn’s faculty senate and an assistant
professor in the School of Social Policy & Practice. “She wrote as if she
was responding to shareholders — not to young people who might be grieving
and in pain.”
In terms of mental health, Penn students face a unique challenge. The school
culture is notoriously competitive, a battle among valedictorian-level
intellects where a Work harder, play harder mentality runs from the Wharton
Business School to the humanities and sciences. Last year, 34th Street
Magazine published a survey that found 71 percent of Penn students got
blackout drunk at least once in college. For close to 25 percent, blacking
out was the goal. Some kids also talk about a phenomenon called “Penn Face,
” in which students express how stressful their lives are without ever
showing any strain.
This culture may not be responsible for Hatcher’s death, or Holleran’s.
But should it change in some way so that the next Hatcher or Holleran might
be helped?
University spokesman Ron Ozio didn’t make any Penn administrators or
professors available for interviews. Late in February, however, Penn’s
silence was broken: The dean of the School of Social Policy & Practice,
Richard Gelles, told me one of his students — later identified as Alice
Wiley — had died by suicide over break, prior to Holleran and Hatcher.
Penn can’t exactly be accused of hiding Wiley’s death; the school says it
wasn’t aware of it until January. No law requires universities to track or
disclose suicides among their student bodies. Experts also present strong
data demonstrating that publicizing a suicide can encourage further suicides
— a phenomenon known as the “contagion” effect. And out of respect for
privacy or liability concerns, universities usually defer to the deceased
student’s parents, rendering a campus suicide a secret.
History suggests, however, that a cluster of suicides brings change. Drexel
University responded to a pair of suicides last year by forming a task force
, which is still making recommendations. Penn’s fellow Ivy League school
Cornell suffered a cluster of suicides from 2009 to 2011 and moved swiftly
to upgrade its mental health services. And momentum is developing for
changes at Penn and beyond. | u*****a
发帖数: 6276 | 5 An online petition promoting “The Madison Holleran Law,” to be presented
in the New Jersey state legislature, is gathering thousands of signatures,
seeking to force universities to publicly report suicides. CAPS also faces
pressure to further increase its staff size. A scoop by Penn’s student
newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, turned up documents that revealed
students often endure three-to-four-week waits for an initial visit — an
eternity for someone struggling with the sudden onset of a mental illness.
Those documents lent support to similar reports Penn students gave me. CAPS
’s 38 full-time staff members are a mix of psychiatrists, social workers
and interns. Cornell, in the wake of its own spate of suicides, has roughly
3,000 fewer students than Penn but an equal number of staffers. Even the
most progressive aspect of Penn’s response — the mental health task force
— seemed inadequate, given that no student representatives were invited to
participate.
There are few if any clear lines between the recent deaths and failures in
Penn’s mental health services. Little is known about the suicides of Alice
Wiley and Wendy Shung. Hatcher fought depression for years, and preferred to
see his longtime doctor in Miami Beach via Skype. “Penn had nothing to do
with his suicide,” says Lizzy Hatcher. “I think he just got tired of the
fight. He enjoyed his classes and friends. He loved Philadelphia.”
Madison Holleran did seek help from CAPS after telling her family over
Thanksgiving break that she was stressed and having suicidal thoughts. But
Holleran didn’t stay long at CAPS. She attended one or two sessions, with
an intern; seeing a senior staff member would have required her to wait
several weeks. She ultimately saw a counselor closer to her home in New
Jersey.
Holleran’s father doesn’t blame the university for his daughter’s death.
But in response to their losses, Penn’s students took to the school paper’
s opinion pages, social media and message boards. Wharton sophomore Erica
Ligenza wrote of being afraid to confess that she has anxiety issues in such
a high-achieving environment. Hilary Barlowe complained that CAPS dismissed
her suicidal feelings as a “normal adjustment” to college. Barlowe had
been on psychiatric leave.
Sophomore Alexandra Sternlicht wrote an article in the DP, “Left to Grieve
Alone, Together,” decrying how Penn, unlike Yale, Brown, Dartmouth and
Harvard, does not automatically send student-wide emails after anyone dies.
Further, students must notify professors themselves when a friend in the
student body passes away.
“Not only is Penn’s neglectful response to death an exception amongst peer
institutions,” wrote Sternlicht. “[I]t is also unhealthy. And even Penn
knows it. According to Penn’s Behavioral Corporate Services, when the
subject of death is ‘avoided, ignored or denied,’ the grieving process is
compromised. … Penn is compromising students’ mental health.”
Ghose, probably the most outspoken of Penn’s faculty members on the recent
suicides, agrees that more action — and honest reflection — is needed. “
It would be irresponsible to blame the university for these deaths,” says
Ghose. “But it is also true that this is an occasion for the university to
look at itself, and our culture, and improve our mental health services.
Because this is an elite university. But our mental health on campus is not
elite. … And I think the administration should just acknowledge that.”
One student on a Penn-based mental health website dubbed “Pennsive” wrote
that after she survived a second suicide attempt in two years, she received
a hospital visit from a Penn administrator.
“Are we going to make this an annual pattern?” the administrator asked.
“No,” the student said.
The administrator left then, handing her a business card.
MADISON HOLLERAN AND INGRID HUNG met on campus, maybe three weeks into the
fall semester. The two shared at least one meal together per day, and every
so often, Holleran declared a “movie night,” meaning snacks — she had a
peanut butter obsession — and romantic comedies.
Dressed in a crew jacket and jeans, her black hair covering her shoulders,
Hung sits in a Starbucks near the Penn campus. She recalls their last movie
date, watching The Parent Trap the night before Holleran died, and their
friendship. “Maddy and I bonded around feeling homesick,” Hung says of
their usual conversations. “And we talked a lot about just getting through
it. ‘Freshman year!’ We would say to each other, ‘We are going to make it
at Penn. We will make friends. We will join a sorority. And we will be
happy.’”
Hung says Holleran admitted that she missed her family, friends and soccer.
She also feared that turning down Lehigh’s soccer scholarship was a mistake
. Hung doesn’t cite the pressure of Penn, specifically, for Holleran’s
troubles. She says that leaving home and attending any college would have
been tough for Madison. Hung also saw her struggle with the burden
particular to their generation — to have a great time, always, and post
pictures of her revels on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
“I’m not sure how I’m even going to talk to my friends back home,”
Holleran told Hung. “I look at my friends on Facebook, and they all seem so
happy. They are all having these great college experiences, and I’m not.”
Today, Hung commiserates.
“On social media, everyone presents a false picture of their life,” she
says. “No one ever posts a picture of themselves looking sad. Everyone is
at the coolest party. And I think all of us wonder, sometimes, ‘Why isn’t
my life like that? Why don’t I feel like smiling like them?’”
The version of herself that Holleran projected to the world online offered
no clues to the turmoil she held inside. Her Instagram stream is rife with
pretty pictures. And any stress she expressed on Twitter reads like typical
schoolgirl patter.
“FREEEEEDiOM!!!!!!!!!!!! Spendin my last day in Philly with my gf before
headin home,” she wrote on December 20th.
“VS fashion show is on and I’m in the damn library,” she wrote on
December 10th. “Something here is not right.”
There is also a cell-phone video of a November Penn track meet that captures
Holleran running a race. She rounds a corner and pulls a muscle, maybe 10
yards from the finish line. She seizes up, then jerks along, fighting, till
she can finally throw herself across the finish line.
“That’s my Maddy,” says a family friend. “Tough as ever.” | u*****a
发帖数: 6276 | 6 An online petition promoting “The Madison Holleran Law,” to be presented
in the New Jersey state legislature, is gathering thousands of signatures,
seeking to force universities to publicly report suicides. CAPS also faces
pressure to further increase its staff size. A scoop by Penn’s student
newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, turned up documents that revealed
students often endure three-to-four-week waits for an initial visit — an
eternity for someone struggling with the sudden onset of a mental illness.
Those documents lent support to similar reports Penn students gave me. CAPS
’s 38 full-time staff members are a mix of psychiatrists, social workers
and interns. Cornell, in the wake of its own spate of suicides, has roughly
3,000 fewer students than Penn but an equal number of staffers. Even the
most progressive aspect of Penn’s response — the mental health task force
— seemed inadequate, given that no student representatives were invited to
participate.
There are few if any clear lines between the recent deaths and failures in
Penn’s mental health services. Little is known about the suicides of Alice
Wiley and Wendy Shung. Hatcher fought depression for years, and preferred to
see his longtime doctor in Miami Beach via Skype. “Penn had nothing to do
with his suicide,” says Lizzy Hatcher. “I think he just got tired of the
fight. He enjoyed his classes and friends. He loved Philadelphia.”
Madison Holleran did seek help from CAPS after telling her family over
Thanksgiving break that she was stressed and having suicidal thoughts. But
Holleran didn’t stay long at CAPS. She attended one or two sessions, with
an intern; seeing a senior staff member would have required her to wait
several weeks. She ultimately saw a counselor closer to her home in New
Jersey.
Holleran’s father doesn’t blame the university for his daughter’s death.
But in response to their losses, Penn’s students took to the school paper’
s opinion pages, social media and message boards. Wharton sophomore Erica
Ligenza wrote of being afraid to confess that she has anxiety issues in such
a high-achieving environment. Hilary Barlowe complained that CAPS dismissed
her suicidal feelings as a “normal adjustment” to college. Barlowe had
been on psychiatric leave.
Sophomore Alexandra Sternlicht wrote an article in the DP, “Left to Grieve
Alone, Together,” decrying how Penn, unlike Yale, Brown, Dartmouth and
Harvard, does not automatically send student-wide emails after anyone dies.
Further, students must notify professors themselves when a friend in the
student body passes away.
“Not only is Penn’s neglectful response to death an exception amongst peer
institutions,” wrote Sternlicht. “[I]t is also unhealthy. And even Penn
knows it. According to Penn’s Behavioral Corporate Services, when the
subject of death is ‘avoided, ignored or denied,’ the grieving process is
compromised. … Penn is compromising students’ mental health.”
Ghose, probably the most outspoken of Penn’s faculty members on the recent
suicides, agrees that more action — and honest reflection — is needed. “
It would be irresponsible to blame the university for these deaths,” says
Ghose. “But it is also true that this is an occasion for the university to
look at itself, and our culture, and improve our mental health services.
Because this is an elite university. But our mental health on campus is not
elite. … And I think the administration should just acknowledge that.”
One student on a Penn-based mental health website dubbed “Pennsive” wrote
that after she survived a second suicide attempt in two years, she received
a hospital visit from a Penn administrator.
“Are we going to make this an annual pattern?” the administrator asked.
“No,” the student said.
The administrator left then, handing her a business card.
MADISON HOLLERAN AND INGRID HUNG met on campus, maybe three weeks into the
fall semester. The two shared at least one meal together per day, and every
so often, Holleran declared a “movie night,” meaning snacks — she had a
peanut butter obsession — and romantic comedies.
Dressed in a crew jacket and jeans, her black hair covering her shoulders,
Hung sits in a Starbucks near the Penn campus. She recalls their last movie
date, watching The Parent Trap the night before Holleran died, and their
friendship. “Maddy and I bonded around feeling homesick,” Hung says of
their usual conversations. “And we talked a lot about just getting through
it. ‘Freshman year!’ We would say to each other, ‘We are going to make it
at Penn. We will make friends. We will join a sorority. And we will be
happy.’”
Hung says Holleran admitted that she missed her family, friends and soccer.
She also feared that turning down Lehigh’s soccer scholarship was a mistake
. Hung doesn’t cite the pressure of Penn, specifically, for Holleran’s
troubles. She says that leaving home and attending any college would have
been tough for Madison. Hung also saw her struggle with the burden
particular to their generation — to have a great time, always, and post
pictures of her revels on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
“I’m not sure how I’m even going to talk to my friends back home,”
Holleran told Hung. “I look at my friends on Facebook, and they all seem so
happy. They are all having these great college experiences, and I’m not.”
Today, Hung commiserates.
“On social media, everyone presents a false picture of their life,” she
says. “No one ever posts a picture of themselves looking sad. Everyone is
at the coolest party. And I think all of us wonder, sometimes, ‘Why isn’t
my life like that? Why don’t I feel like smiling like them?’”
The version of herself that Holleran projected to the world online offered
no clues to the turmoil she held inside. Her Instagram stream is rife with
pretty pictures. And any stress she expressed on Twitter reads like typical
schoolgirl patter.
“FREEEEEDiOM!!!!!!!!!!!! Spendin my last day in Philly with my gf before
headin home,” she wrote on December 20th.
“VS fashion show is on and I’m in the damn library,” she wrote on
December 10th. “Something here is not right.”
There is also a cell-phone video of a November Penn track meet that captures
Holleran running a race. She rounds a corner and pulls a muscle, maybe 10
yards from the finish line. She seizes up, then jerks along, fighting, till
she can finally throw herself across the finish line.
“That’s my Maddy,” says a family friend. “Tough as ever.” | u*****a
发帖数: 6276 | 7 “I AM VERY LUCKY to be alive,” says Jack Park. He is tall, slim and well-
dressed, with dark eyes, a gentle demeanor and a soft speaking voice. A
junior at Penn, Park announced in February, through social media, that he
had attempted suicide in his dorm room — twice. Park has attained a kind of
celebrity in recent months, a fact about which he seems humble, even
bemused. “I am very pleased that you are interested in my story,” he says.
Alerting the world to his battle with mental illness was brave enough. But
Park also publicly listed his phone number and email address. “My operating
hours are 24/7, 365,” he wrote in a Tumblr post, taking what reads like a
slap at CAPS, which only added evening hours after the recent suicides. “To
make time for these calls, I dropped courses to take only the four minimum
credits legally required for international kids to attend Penn. Please,
please, do not attempt to kill yourself and call this number if you want to
hear me out. Life is so much more beautiful than death. I taught myself this
the hard way. … ”
Park took a semester off from school, returned to Penn, and completed his
sophomore year before the Holleran and Hatcher suicides convinced him to go
public.
“I take medication now,” he says, without a trace of shyness, “for
depression and bipolar disorder, and I feel good.” | u*****a
发帖数: 6276 | 8 Traditionally, people who survive suicide attempts keep the topic secret.
But these days, Park isn’t alone. Drexel business student Drew Bergman
gives lectures about his own suicide attempts. Online, the website Live
Through This has gathered more than three dozen testimonials from suicide
survivors — teachers, health-care professionals, moms and dads. In April,
the New York Times chronicled this new openness among suicide prevention
experts in talking about suicide attempts.
In part, these initiatives spring from a growing understanding that mental
health should be addressed in the same terms as our physical health. No
young adult would hesitate to tell her parents that her knee hurts. But
admitting that thoughts of suicide keep popping up, or that feelings of
anxiousness and depression are all-consuming, still carries a stigma. The
reason is easy to see: A bum knee is just something we have. We believe our
thoughts reveal who we are.
Mental health, however, relates to physical workings in our brain.
Researchers at Columbia who study suicide have published data showing that
abnormalities in brain chemistry and structure are present in the suicidal
— including deficiencies in pleasure-dealing serotonin. “These things are
treatable,” says Columbia researcher J. John Mann, “with therapy and
medication, and that’s what people need to understand.”
Capitalizing on this knowledge requires a bold cultural shift in which
parents teach their kids to talk about their mental health as freely as they
would a headache. “It’s a new and very hopeful time,” says Christine
Moutier, from the AFSP. “All of these people who used to stay in the dark
are coming out now, despite the stigma, and putting a face on this issue.” | A***u
发帖数: 3714 | 9 Support
关注孩子mental health. 一个大学文凭算个p. 好好地健康活着是第一重要。 |
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