After Seven Suicides, a Professor Unearths Stories of Where People Find Resilience

I n 14 months of heartache that started in March 2014, seven people at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ended their lives. Six were students.

Daniel Jackson reeled from the losses while turning over in his head the culpability of faculty members in an extremely competitive environment. Mr. Jackson, a professor of computer science who is also a photographer, saw what he called a “giant iceberg of unhappiness” with only the tip apparent.

No person’s death by suicide is the same as another, but mental illness — in particular, anxiety and depression — and the stigma associated with treatment can be significant factors. In the aftermath of the deaths at MIT, the resonance of two personal accounts in the campus newspaper inspired Mr. Jackson to produce a series of portraits and interviews with others who had battled or were still fighting their own demons. Portraits of Resilience appeared in the campus newspaper over the spring 2016 semester. The subjects — students as well as faculty and staff members — shared concerns over strenuous course loads, the impacts of family members’ deaths, and even thoughts of suicide. All of that sounds depressing, but the individual stories often end on an optimistic note.

The portraits and interviews have since been collected in a book, and MIT plans to distribute copies to students this month.

Mr. Jackson spoke with The Chronicle about the struggle of some students to see themselves beyond their coursework, people’s willingness to discuss their mental health, and actions that faculty members can take to help.

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I’m trying to put myself in the head space of being on campus as several people took their lives. Could you tell me what it was like?

It was a tragic weight on the whole campus that everyone felt. As faculty, we feel a sense of helplessness and also a sense of responsibility in creating the environment, which is often part of the problem.

But in talking to students at length over the course of my project, I came to realize that the impact of these tragic suicides on students is a different order of magnitude. Several of them said to me, quite amazingly, that when they considered taking their own lives, they felt they couldn’t do it because of the pain that they had experienced or had seen in others when even someone they didn’t know took their life.

The sense of responsibility you mentioned, was it as though you felt culpable?

We put a huge amount of effort into trying to shape the experience that our students have in their education and research, to make sure that it’s positive and nourishing. When things like this happen, obviously it makes us wonder if we are failing in that respect. As I pursued this project further, it made me wonder if we were not only perhaps failing to provide the right kind of environment, but actually creating some of the factors that were leading to the problems.

But how much of this is unique to MIT, and how much of it is higher education as a whole?

One aspect is not unique to MIT, but at least to a set of universities that are particularly competitive. It’s this oft-repeated story that someone comes from a high school where they were in the top 10, and they were sent to MIT as the great star of that school. Then they come and find that they’re just average, because MIT students are an extraordinary bunch. That is an incredibly disorienting and debilitating shock, and maybe takes time to sink in. I doubt it’s any different at Stanford or Caltech or Harvard or Yale or anywhere like that.

There’s a second factor, which I suspect is universal. My sense is that for a whole load of reasons — partly economic and partly cultural — today students feel much more that they’re being assessed by a bunch of metrics: grade-point average, the scholarships they’ve received, how prestigious their summer internships are, and so on. These measures sort of become proxies for meaning and purpose in life. Previously, maybe you could have derived great satisfaction from simply doing well in your classes and feeling that you were learning interesting, exciting things, that you were broadening your mind, and that you had a life ahead of you of purpose, of doing good things in the world.

Instead a lot of students are asking themselves, Well, what’s my GPA, and have I got a good summer internship, and what’s my starting salary, measuring themselves in this very relative, competitive way. And you just can’t win that, because — except for one person — everybody else will not be at the top. Even one of my interviewees revealed that as someone at the top, he came to realize that this was just a very unsatisfying, meaningless sort of path to fulfillment.

Did this come up often with students?

Many of the students, when I asked them if they would provide advice to fellow students, the very first thing they said was: “Have something in your life that isn’t your GPA. Have something you care about. Because if you are nothing more than your academics, then you will be judged by your GPA, and eventually you’ll fail.”

I read that one student would have these three-hour lunches with friends, and how the idea of taking his life seemed pretty hard because he had all these people invested in him.

That was Victor Morales. He was just the most extraordinary story.

When someone tells you something like that, what’s your response?

I was sitting there listening to him with tears in my eyes, just incredibly moved by it. I was nervous at the beginning of the project that I was not only going to have to respond in some intelligent way to these powerful stories, but was going to have to do what you’re doing. I was going to have to ask intelligent questions. But it turned out that my role was for the most part just to sit and listen.

Was there a sense of worry or trepidation in handling these stories? Sometimes when I talk to people who share emotionally vulnerable thoughts with me, I worry: What if I get this wrong?

When I started the project, I was really naïve about this. My intent was to have a gallery of photographic portraits. I thought that I was just interviewing people to hear their stories, and to find that beautiful, inspiring excerpt to use in the caption.

It was only when the project got underway that I realized they were basically giving me their whole life story. It’s crazy to try and extract some pithy little piece from that. And the whole mini-autobiography deserved to be told. I was naïve about how moving I would find the experience, and how intense and powerful it would be for the storytellers themselves.

Has this project affected the way you now interact with students, or teach?

First of all, I am more keenly aware of these problems. I try to signal to students that I am open to having discussions about these issues and am eager to help them in any way possible. The students tend to react very positively to that.

A second thing is when a student approaches me, as they often do, and says, for example, “I’d like to talk to you about the course.” In the past I might have said something like, “What’s it about? If it’s an issue with the problem set, can I just check that you’ve already tried talking to a teaching assistant?,” thinking that we should sort of triage. But I realize now that a student who approaches a professor, particularly in a large class, has already overcome a considerable amount of emotional inertia. Really, it’s not a time to ask questions. It’s a time to meet with them. Even if they say they want to discuss the course, often there’s something larger going on.

I have become a bit more proactive — maybe quite a lot more proactive — in encouraging students to seek help. I am not imagining I can solve their problems for them, but trying to solicit whether they’re getting the help they need, and if necessary nudging them gently to get that help. That’s happened quite a few times.

In the design of the course itself, I’m thinking about how to lay out the assignments, the schedule, and the deadlines to try to minimize the amount of pressure on the students and to give them flexibility.

Is there anything we’ve missed?

At a scientific, technological, engineering-oriented university, we want explanations for everything. But people told me that they coped with depression in ways that are sort of counter to that view of the world. Many people told me that they’d found spiritual or religious practices, and those communities had been very supportive and had given them a sense of meaning and solace. One woman had had Bell’s palsy that lasted much longer than the hospital told her it would. After six months, she decided that she would just reconcile herself to the pain she was experiencing constantly and to the fear that she wouldn’t be able to smile again. And she decided to throw herself into meditation and yoga. Within days her condition basically resolved itself.

I don’t want to emphasize this sort of magical aspect of it, but she articulated beautifully the sense that sometimes we have to relinquish control, and sometimes the very act of relinquishing control and admitting our own ignorance can be the solution that we need.

Chris Quintana is a breaking-news reporter. Follow him on Twitter @cquintanadc or email him at chris.quintana@chronicle.com.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.