Special Education

In a 12-month period from 2003 to 2004, six New York University students committed suicide. These were very public suicides. “They were all jumping from buildings, as opposed to quietly hurting themselves in their rooms,” said Zoe Ragouzeos, the university’s director of counseling and wellness.
Enlarge This Image
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Zoe Ragouzeos of New York University said that the pain from student suicides forced the university to take broad measures.
Related


Room For Debate: Who Qualifies for the Insanity Defense?

(How public? On March 10, 2004, The New York Post published a photo of a student falling 24 stories, accompanied by the headline “Death Plunge No. 4.”)

“We painfully realized the effect on our community was so great we had to do something,” Ms. Ragouzeos said.

What N.Y.U. did over the next few years was overhaul and expand its services, creating what is considered one of the top campus mental health programs in the country.

There’s a pattern here. Some of the best university programs — at Virginia Tech, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Western Kentucky University — have been spurred by some of the worst tragedies.

So the question is: Will Pima Community College in Tucson — alma mater of Jared L. Loughner, the man charged with shooting to death six people this month — be the next to create something good from something so bad?

At N.Y.U., the mental health staff was expanded to 40 clinicians from 25. The university added a 24-hour hot line that now takes 9,000 calls a year (the phone number is on the back of every student ID card). The walk-in clinic for students in crisis is open 60 hours a week, compared with 15 hours in 2004. Crisis teams consisting of social workers with master’s degrees are dispatched round the clock, whether it’s to calm a student throwing a cellphone across the room in a 9 a.m. class or to arrange a hospitalization for someone talking about killing himself in a dormitory at 3 a.m.

The university used to refer students in need of psychotropic medication to private psychiatrists who can charge $300 an hour; now there are five in-house psychiatrists who charge a $30 co-pay per session.

N.Y.U. has also added a mental health first-aid training course. Employees who work in campus hot spots learn to identify mental illness symptoms as well as how to defuse a tense situation until help arrives. A hot spot is any place prone to frustrate, including the financial aid office (“Students really get stressed if they don’t get the money they need,” Ms. Ragouzeos said), the bursar’s office (“They stress if they can’t return to school because they owe money”) and the registrar’s office (“They’re not happy if they don’t get the right classes”).

While it’s likely that these improvements have contributed to the sharp drop in deaths in recent years, the suicides have not stopped. Asked when the last one occurred, Ms. Ragouzeos did not have to look it up. “Nov. 3, 2009,” she said. Asked how she remembered, she said, “You remember.”

When mental health advocates at the National Alliance on Mental Illness— as well as at the Jed Foundation and Active Minds, which both focus on college students — are asked to name universities with strong programs, the ones they single out have all learned the hard way.

M.I.T. expanded its program after a rash of suicides in the 1990s that culminated in April 2000 with the suspected suicide of Elizabeth Shin in a dormitory room fire that she may have set herself. In a lawsuit that was subsequently settled, her parents contended that professors ignored e-mails by Ms. Shin saying she wanted to kill herself and that the counseling service provided minimal help.

Western Kentucky added resources after the rape and murder of a freshman, Katie Autry, in her Poland Hall dormitory room in May 2003.

And after 32 people at Virginia Tech were shot to death in April 2007 by Seung-Hui Cho, a senior with a long history of mental illness, the university increased its mental health budget by 50 percent. According to a spokesman, Lawrence Hincker, the university, with 30,000 students, has spent an additional $1 million a year, including adding a second psychiatrist, two nurse practitioners and seven more counselors.

At Pima Community College, it appears that the campus police dealt responsibly with Jared L. Loughner in the year before his shooting rampage. According to a 51-page report released by the college, the police frequently responded to complaints about him from faculty members and students. And after Mr. Loughner was asked to leave the college last September, the police delivered a letter to his home explaining his suspension and then talked with his father.

Even though the report says college officials suspected that Mr. Loughner was seriously mentally ill, there is no indication that he received mental health care at Pima. That is because Pima, with 68,000 students, has no mental health care. Cindy Klinge, a college spokeswoman, said in an e-mail that after having “conducted countless interviews,” Pima was granting no more.

Resources :