A Young Woman Writes of Her Brother’s Death at the College of William and Mary
Your heart will break for this young lady as you read this. She clearly loved her brother very much.
Cassie Smith-Christmas wrote about her brother at the Washington Post.
On a brother’s suicide: ‘I wish I had never told him to go to counseling’
I do not blame William and Mary for my brother’s suicide in April 2010.
This decision was his and his alone and I will never know whether the way William and Mary treated him in the weeks leading up to his tragic decision would have made a difference in the outcome.
However, what I do know is that if William and Mary would have had a compassionate policy towards mental illness, they would have saved my family a great deal of anguish in this already immensely difficult time.
It is for this reason–to possibly save another family from the anguish we suffered–that I am writing this open and very personal letter.
This has been very difficult for me to write. I do not necessarily want people to know these things about me and my family, but, in light of recent events, I find that I cannot in good conscience keep silent about this. Please know that I am writing this in a personal capacity only and the views expressed here are my own. I also want to emphasize that what I am about to say is not against William and Mary as an institution of learning and research but against a specific policy it has towards students admitting suicidal thoughts.
The recent Washington Post article (April 15, 2015) and an earlier article (November 13, 2010) following the tragic deaths of Paul Soutter and Whitney Mayer, respectively, highlight the stance William and Mary seems to take towards student suicides: that a student population of extremely stressed, over-achieving students means that it was simply the pressure, the wanting to be the best and the fear of failure that drove the students to take their own lives, not any failings within the institution itself.
On a brother’s suicide: ‘I wish I had never told him to go to counseling’ (The Washington Post)
Comments
I’d agree with part of William and Mary’s stance…it is ultimately a person’s decision to end their own life.
The letter is a bit convenient because the public has no access to the documents from his care providers or the school and neither are allowed to release them. I’m not saying this person is dishonest but intense grief has a way of making people stray from objectivity.
The bit of “double-speak” of blame/absolution that courses throughout the letter seem to indicate to me the grief-driven loss of objectivity mired with the desire to try (but fail) to remain objective.
I also picked up on something very subtle that could have contributed to this mess. Sounds like dad was pushing him a bit to move on and get back when he clearly wasn’t ready. His letter speaks about worrying about how this affects his future and how he assures the school that his son is completely on board with going back to school to finish up….the tragic results would indicate a situation contrary to dad’s claim.