Suicide on a Saturday night

Some nights ago I was playing chess with a suicidal man. Hurricane Isabel had turned out largely disappointing for most of the campus, but I certainly felt like I was in the eye of a storm. After all, it was eerily tranquil that moment as we sat in silence considering our next moves, but I knew that forces surged around us, for rather than contemplating rook takes bishop, my partner was weighing whether to forfeit the entire game.

Awkward considerations occurred to me during the chess: Should we talk or sit in silence? Should I let him win? When will the counselor call? Just when he put my king in check, the counselor did call. After a lengthy conversation, my friend hung up the phone and told me he was going to sleep.

That was all. Nobody was coming. He wasn't going anywhere . . . just to bed. The eye of the hurricane then passed and the winds resumed again.

Sadly, this is already the third time I have had to handle a situation of potential or attempted suicide on campus. Through my personal experiences as well as my time as an R.A. and my three years on the Student Health Advisory Board, I have a good sense of the University's policies and preparedness regarding the issue. We are doing a lot of things well, but there is plenty that worries me.

We are a particularly risky population. Most students fall within the age range with one of the highest suicide rates, late teens and twenty-somethings. We are a campus filled with people with Type-A tendencies. How many students do you know who are high-strung stressed-out ants-in-their-pants borderline perfectionists? At Princeton, when you ask, "How are you?" the most common response is not "fine" or "good," but "busy" and the ever popular "tired." Most everyone is stretched thin and unaccustomed to failure. David Brooks was on to something — there are many organization kids round these parts. Mental health is at a premium at this school. Consider the estimate that one in four undergraduate women have some form of eating disorder. And look at bicker. That very institution is insane.

The university does take mental health very seriously, and though it is strong in preventative services, I am concerned about its ability to deal with unfolding crises. To Princeton's credit, University Health Services recently invested an enormous amount in renovating its facilities in McCosh where it chose to devote the entire third floor to the Counseling Center, a clear recognition of the services' importance. Every student is allotted ten free hours of counseling to use at his or her discretion. Students can see a counselor urgently if need be during business hours. After-hours, however, accessing care is a more hazy matter.

There is always a counselor on-call, and they provide counseling via telephone, but there is no specific suicide hotline nor is there a counselor at the center overnight or on weekends should a student want or need to be interned for suicidal tendencies. After hours, there is only a nurse who is often quite occupied with all those drunken people who tend to be brought in precisely on nights and weekends. Most nurses are not specifically trained for suicidal patients and should not be saddled with that burden. Surely, if a student expresses that they might want to kill themselves in the night, the counselor will take some action to put that student in a safer place (a hospital perhaps). Actually, not necessarily. Between the time when a student expresses signs or states that they might kill themselves, there is a chance that nothing will happen at all. They might stay where they are that night, possibly alone. It has happened before. Who watches that student during that after-hours gray zone? The answer is as critical as it is variable.

So maybe the university should create a suicide hotline. Maybe it should invest in a 24-hour counselor. Maybe it should err even more on the side of caution and intern anyone who seems to be seriously contemplating ending it all. Surely we don't want to overreact or be insensitive, but the alternative is much worse. The liability issues alone should make the university question its current arrangements. Assuming that a suicidal student is probably alright on the basis of a phone call is utterly inadequate and dangerous. They should not be allowed to stay put. Let us stop hoping for the best and striving to make even more certain that tragedy, which already struck last year in the case of a graduate student, does not strike again. The solution must be carefully thought out, but let's begin the brainstorming. If we don't, it is likely that another storm, beyond the eye of the hurricane we found ourselves in, will come and grab us instead.