A candlelit memorial service in February drew out hundreds—family, friends, and faculty—all of whom had circled outside Low Library to remember the life of Eric Harms, the School of Engineering and Applied Science first-year who took his own life this past winter. As his loved ones remembered a warm and funny friend, devoted student leader, and talented musician, they also had a plea for his fellow students: to never suffer a silence as he had, and to avoid the devastating consequences.
Harms’ death followed the suicide of SEAS senior Richard Ng in spring 2006. As students grappled with the loss of one of their own, a renewed spotlight was put on campus counseling offerings and efforts to erase the stigma of depression and mental illness.
“I never felt that there wasn’t enough outreach,” Judy Kim, recently elected 2012 Engineering Student Council president and who served with Harms on the ESC, said earlier in the semester.
Campus health service offerings and student-run support groups were better publicized than ever, but the campus was still faced with the question of how to keep that momentum for discussion going.
For Columbia’s Counseling and Psychological Services and Barnard’s Furman Center, appealing to undergraduate students who may be in need was an ongoing difficulty, directors said, as the stigma of seeking counseling seemed to permeate the students of a large university more than their counterparts at smaller colleges.
In 2008, Furman saw 24 percent of the approximately 2,300 members of the Barnard student body, and CPS saw a combined 4,000 students from the 25,000 attending all schools within Columbia, both undergraduate and graduate—about 16 percent of the student body. CPS Director Richard Eichler said that undergraduates come “disproportionate to their numbers.”
But even before Harms’ death, the University had been making greater strides toward more encompassing health care on campus. CPS implemented a new program in September in which students coming to primary care medical services are given brief depression screenings, and student response to the screening has been largely positive.
Still, representatives from the Student Health Advisory Committee—a committee of student representatives from the Columbia College Student Council, ESC, and other student groups on campus, and contains a mental-health subcommittee—said that their offerings could be improved, especially in the wake of some criticism following Harms’ death.
“If we are neglecting our duty to detect the mental health problems within our student body, then we are not doing our job as well as we can,” CCSC President George Krebs, CC ’09, said in an e-mail this semester. “That may have been what happened in Eric’s case.”
The mental-health subcommittee is now working with resident advisers to improve the support system outside the administrative and academic realms and inside the dorms.
The renewed focus on campus mental health may provide a boost to groups that were struggling to gain support or attention for these causes. A campus chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness was started two years ago, but organizers had trouble sustaining interest in the group’s events. Students Against Silence, a group formed in 2001 in response to the suicides on campus around that time, has been on hiatus. While SAS has stagnated with its two leaders currently studying abroad, co-president Saidah Adams, CC ’10, said the group hopes to expand its scope by becoming a chapter of the national organization, Active Minds.
As students reassess and regroup for next year, campus counseling centers are still trying to draw in students to their sometimes underutilized services, despite sometimes mixed reviews from students.
“There’s still a problem that people who could be served and may be suffering are not coming in,” Mary Commerford, director of Furman, said.