In the wake of recent Ole Miss student suicides, other students on campus are making efforts to raise awareness about mental health disorders and suicide through various events during Mental Health Week at the end of March.
One organization on campus working hard to combat this stigma surrounding suicide and mental health is Active Minds, a “nonprofit organization that empowers students to speak openly about mental health in order to educate others and encourage help-seeking,” according to their website. Kathryn Forbes, the co-founder and current president of Active Minds at Ole Miss, works with other students on campus to create an environment where a discussion about mental health and suicide is encouraged.
“People don’t want to assume that they’re broken and need help,” Forbes said. “We share so quickly if and when there’s something physically wrong with us, like having a cold or broken bone. When it comes to mental health, there’s still such a big stigma that you might come across as crazy so we’re really just trying to get the conversation going and make it less of something that you need to be embarrassed about.”
There have been 39 known incidents involving suicide attempts reported to the University Police Department at the University of Mississippi since 2013, according to the Clery Daily Crime Log. In a recent report by the Huffington Post, more than 1,000 suicides occur on college campuses each year. In other words, two to three suicides happen every day in college communities.
The numbers speak for themselves, and chances are, you or someone you know have been affected by suicide. Despite the high incidence, there is not a lot of transparency from university officials when incidents like this occur.
In April of 2016, a student living in Residence Hall 1 committed suicide, and the day still haunts Darby Johnson, a Community Assistant working in that residence hall at the time.
“It was horrifying,” Johnson said. “We saw him a couple days before, and there were no warning signs at all.”
Tristan Byrd, a freshman from Brandon, Mississippi took his life on April 26, 2016. According to Johnson, he had been diagnosed with leukemia, but CAs didn’t know about this fact until after the death.
“I don’t know how else we would’ve caught it unless he was personally talking to us about his diagnosis,” Johnson said. “We can’t take any blame for this even though we felt horrible. You’re supposed to recognize these things, but there were no signs.”
Johnson and other Community Assistants went through a two-week training prior to school picking back up in August, but there was not much guidance on how to deal with students struggling with mental health disorders and suicidal thoughts, according to Johsnon.
“There was only a little training on noticing students and their emotions,” Johnson said. “He seemed so normal and calm, just like he always had.”
As little guidance as there was for CAs in handling situations involving suicide, there was even less communication with the other students living in the residence hall at the time.
“There was such a lack of communication with the other residents,” Johnson said. “We weren’t even allowed to say he committed suicide. Instead, we were told to say a resident has passed or an incident has happened.”
Full disclosure: I was a freshman living in Residence Hall 1 at the time and remember waking up to police officers in the lobby. There was never any official word about why police were there, and if resources had been made available to me, I was unaware.
Despite the common occurrence that suicide has become on college campuses, it’s still something that nobody seems to want to talk about.
Forbes, who has struggled with anxiety and depression herself, brought Active Minds to Oxford back in the fall of 2015 and is currently planning some events on campus during Mental Health Week. These events will take place March 26-29 in the hopes of furthering the conversation she has started about mental health.
“What I’ve learned with Active Minds growing is that it gets bigger because students realize that this is something that needs to be discussed,” Forbes said. “People are willing to share their stories and what they’re struggling with, they just sometimes need to be prodded at first.”
Mental Health Week will feature guest speakers, a gallery with pictures of students across the Ole Miss campus who have been affected by mental health in some way and an event in the Grove called Send Silence Packing, where backpacks will be set up to represent students who have lost their lives to suicide.
Events like this can help students be more aware of the ripple effect their actions and the subsequent trauma can have on others. Within the Phi Delta Theta Fraternity alone, three members have lost their lives to suicide in the past year and a half.
One of these members’ mothers, Betsy Primos, understands how difficult the conversation can be but hopes that by talking about her son’s life, it may prevent another life from being taken by suicide.
“It does hurt to talk about, but it needs to be addressed,” Betsy Primos said. “Truett’s death was a shock for all of us, and it left his us with something that can’t be erased. You can adapt to the loss, but you can never erase it.”
Truett Primos of Flowood, Mississippi, took his life on October 7, 2017 leaving his mother, father, brother and countless friends behind.
“In Truett’s case, this was not what he would have done had he known the heartache of so many friends,” Betsy Primos wrote. “I have many boys at the University of Mississippi that I love dearly, and girls as well. I would never want them to commit suicide because it impacts so many.”
Maggie Crouch 