Northern Michigan University on Friday publicly responded to concerns about a practice, which it says it has discontinued, of warning students that they could face disciplinary action if they discuss suicidal thoughts with other students.
Until this year, the university was sending emails to some severely depressed students that cautioned them against speaking about “suicidal or self-destructive thoughts” to other students. The concern, the emails suggested, was that doing so could overwhelm those students and interfere with their studies.
But to some of those who received the emails, the warning felt like an ill-timed gag order.
An advocacy group says the emails violated the students’ rights and deprived them ‘of peer support at critical moments.’
It prompted one recipient to start an online petition demanding a new policy. It also drew a rebuke from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. The national free-speech group, known as FIRE, said the emails violated the students’ rights and deprived them “of peer support at critical moments.”
The university didn’t respond to an August 25 letter from FIRE seeking clarification about the policy.
Asked early Friday about the controversy, a campus spokesman, Derek Hall, said the university had changed the emails it sends to students “with self-harm inclinations” at the beginning of 2016 after talking to mental-health professionals and students. A sample letter he shared outlines a variety of services available for students but does not threaten to discipline them if they talk to their classmates.
The university has set up a mental-health task force to examine policies “and provide better communication for all involved,” Mr. Hall said.
He did not respond, however, to questions about whether or why the university had stopped discouraging students from confiding self-destructive thoughts to their peers.
FIRE called the university’s response “woefully inadequate,” in part because it fails to explicitly state that students will no longer face repercussions for talking to their friends.
That reluctance to clarify the matter frustrated Katerina Klawes, a senior who received one of the earlier emails from the dean of students’ office last year. It arrived after she had attended a counseling session to talk about the stress caused by a sexual assault the previous year.
The letter, which directed her to mental-health services, also warned that “engaging in any discussion of suicidal or self-destructive thoughts or actions with other students interferes with, or can hinder, their pursuit of education and community. It is important that you refrain from discussing these issues with other students and use the appropriate resources listed below. If you involve other students in suicidal or self-destructive thoughts or actions you will face disciplinary action.”
Upset about that message, she started an online petition that has drawn more than 2,500 signatures.
University administrators told a local newspaper, The Mining Journal, last fall that 25 to 30 students per semester received warnings that they could be disciplined for involving other students in “suicidal or self-destructive thoughts or actions.”
The email sent to Ms. Klawes, Mr. Hall said, was used in limited situations.
“The goal of the Student Life staff has always been providing professional services to students in need,” he wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “Who is responsible for the mental health of our students? The student, their family, and the university.”
‘More Harm Than Good’
Marieke Tuthill Beck-Coon, a senior program officer at FIRE, said that if the university had changed its policy, it should have notified the students who have been under the impression that they could be punished for talking to their friends.
It’s dangerous when you take someone who’s depressed and suicidal, and take away the one support they have.
Feeling comfortable reaching out to friends can be critical when someone is contemplating suicide, according to mental-health experts with whom the group consulted.
“I’ve never heard before of a campus telling students not to speak to each other if they’re in distress,” said Victor Schwartz, medical director of the Jed Foundation, a national nonprofit group focused on college students’ mental health. “It is stigmatizing people who have deep problems. You’re telling them, You have a shameful thing you can’t talk to someone about.”
In rare cases, said Dr. Schwartz, who is also a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at New York University’s School of Medicine, students who are worried they might kill themselves have refused treatment and asked classmates to keep watch on them. During examination periods or other stressful times, a roommate might have trouble concentrating or staying up all night “performing 24-hour watches and keeping track of their roommates,” he said.
“It makes sense for a university to step in, in an extreme case like that, but a blanket policy does more harm than good,” said Dr. Schwartz.
Samantha Fournier, who was required to leave Northern Michigan University in 2009 after what she describes as an accidental overdose, is in her second year back at the university. She said in an interview she had received a diagnosis of major depression with psychosis and doesn’t shy away from telling others about it.
Her roommate had to call 911 when Ms. Fournier overdosed on sleep medications that she says she had been taking because of a severe respiratory infection. The doctor who treated her agreed that the overdose was accidental, she said.
Nonetheless, when she met with a university dean and talked about her anxiety disorder, “she decided to remove me.”
Not only was she considered a threat to herself, she said she had been told, but also a burden on her roommate, who had been her best friend since high school. A few years later, she was allowed to re-enroll, she said, after providing a letter from her doctor saying she wasn’t a danger to herself or anyone else.
Although students today are less likely to face expulsion for threatening to harm themselves, Ms. Fournier is troubled by the mixed messages they’re receiving about reaching out to a friend.
“It’s dangerous when you take someone who’s depressed and suicidal, and take away the one support they have,” she said. “If you talk it out, you’re going to feel better. Keeping it bottled up will eat away at you.”
Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.
Correction (9/27/2016, 6:25 p.m.): This article originally misidentified The Mining Journal, a newspaper in Michigan. It is a local newspaper, not Northern Michigan University’s student newspaper.
