This past spring, during finals week at Utah State University in Logan, a student’s suicide seemed to go unnoticed. Some faculty and students say the way it was handled represents a growing problem when it comes to how Utah institutions of higher education address suicide. Students and Mental Health Officials are trying to change the conversation in a state that ranks 10th in the nation for suicides among 15-24 year olds.
Sarah King will always remember Utah State University’s 2015 spring semester’s finals week. That was when one of her fellow classmates took her life on Old Main Hill, a university landmark. Sarah heard about the suicide through social media. She and other USU students are concerned that nothing was done in any way to give her or other students a chance to recognize or remember their fellow Aggie.
“Nobody that I was aware of had heard about the suicide,” King said. “I saw a Facebook post about it and that was it. It surprised me that nobody knew and that there wasn’t any kind of memorial service or anything for her.”
Kristen Wilcox was another classmate and grew up with the girl who took her own life.
“I felt like it was really sad to know that a girl was to the point where she had to take her own life, that there wasn’t enough people there for her to talk to,” Wilcox said. “She was going through it all on her own. It would be nice to have some posters up or something, holding classes or even just a number to call if somebody is going through something hard that they can’t handle on their own.”
“It makes me sad that people don’t even notice that there’s this like beautiful tree that has a horrible story behind it,” King said. “There’s flowers on it and nobody looks twice at it, they don’t even understand what happened there.”
Curtis Hill counsels students at Southern Utah University in Cedar City. Hill believes that in the event of a suicide, universities need to respond.
“Universities across the country are struggling with just what is the university’s role around mental health and how to best address it,” Hill said. “There need to be resources and people that have the skill set to get out on campus, to aggressively go out and try and figure out who has been impacted by this and to have an organized, coordinated, caring, empathic response.”
While working as a principal at Provo High School, Dr. Greg Hudnall received a phone call at 1:30 in the morning of the New Year. The call came from the Provo City Police Department. Hudnall was asked to go to the park next to the high school and help identify the body of a student who had committed suicide. It was that moment that prompted Hudnall to dedicate his life to preventing suicides.
“When I was in Provo School District as the Associate Superintendent we worked on training every administrator and every student,” Hudnall said. “We were averaging one to two suicides a year, put our program together…we went nine years without a suicide so we know that most suicides can be prevented.”
Hudnall joined with others to form Hope4Utah, a suicide prevention group. The group tours Utah to provide training and educational tools at schools, churches and for individuals on how to assist with suicide prevention, intervention and postvention.
“At a university perspective you have a lot of staff, students living in dorms, students that are employees and then you have professors,” Hudnall said. “So you really want to train them to be able to recognize those signs. The second part of it is really educating everyone on the campus, these are the resources that are available.”
Hudnall emphasized that this training must be ongoing to ensure that everyone is continually trained and aware.
“I’ll even admit, even in my system, after one or two years without a suicide, everybody thinks 'Oh, why do we need to do the training?' The reality is that’s why you continue that training, because you have staff members that leave, you have new students on campus,” Hudnall said. “It really is an ongoing process to focus on prevention, intervention and postvention.”
USU officials could not comment on why postvention services were not provided following the April suicide. Still, Wilcox wonders…
“Everyone’s going through hard times and some people just handle it better than others and we just don’t want this to happen again,” Wilcox said.
For more resources you can visit the Utah Suicide Hotline website.