On an early April morning in 2023, Randy Woodson was wrestling with how to talk about students who had taken their own lives.
It had been a heartbreaking year. Fourteen students at North Carolina State University had died since the previous August, including seven by suicide. Earlier that week, the university had lost two undergraduates to suicide. Woodson, the chancellor, alerted the campus community by email soon afterward. His communications team had removed references to the cause of death.
That morning, reflecting on the past eight months, Woodson wondered whether administrators had gotten it right. “I can’t help but feel that our approach to announcing very broadly each student death is contributing to the media attention as well as potentially to the contagion effect,” Woodson wrote in an email to the university’s chief of staff, Paula Gentius, and Brad Bohlander, a spokesman then.
The chancellor was referring to emails the university had sent to certain faculty and staff members in the immediate aftermath of a suicide, not to the campuswide messages, Bohlander said in a recent interview. Recipients would sometimes share the targeted messages — which included sensitive information, such as the cause of death and the student’s name — with colleagues, Bohlander said, and word would spread rapidly.
“It’s definitely a Catch-22 situation … either approach brings a negative response,” Gentius wrote in reply to Woodson. Woodson responded that he was less concerned about backlash from community members than he was about contagion, in which a self-harm event influences others.
The exchange, made available through a public-records request, speaks to the dilemma that emerges when a student dies by suicide. Their peers and professors expect information — details of the decedent’s life on campus, description of the circumstances around their untimely death. When that doesn’t arrive, it can feel like an erasure.
Often things are out there on social media before the school is in a position to share information, which makes it look like they’re covering things up, when they’re just being careful.
But colleges have to weigh other factors, including the interests of the family, privacy concerns, and the risk for copycat behavior. Sharing too much can come off as adulation and inspire vulnerable students to act on dark impulses. Sharing too little can breed anxiety and set the social-media rumor mill in motion.
This spring, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette was caught in that bind. After a student died by suicide, administrators there had little time to decide what to share with the campus community before word spread online. When the university finally said something, some students felt that it was too little, too late.
“It’s a normal and natural desire to want more information to make sense of what happened, to try and answer the questions that come up when there’s a suicide death,” said Richard Shadick, director of Pace University’s counseling center. “But that information should not be shared at the risk of increasing other deaths.”
Emails exchanged during N.C. State’s suicide cluster reveal that the university’s top leaders mulled whether and how to publicly acknowledge student deaths by suicide in a way that would honor the deceased but not martyr them. Often, it was a race against the clock.
The Chronicle requested documents from N.C. State pertaining to a three-month span in the spring of 2023 during which eight students died, including three by suicide. The batch of records includes communications among university officials, and between them and deceased students’ professors, deans, and colleagues, as well as with advocacy groups and media outlets.
The notifications with the highest stakes — for transparency and for contagion — may have been emails sent by the chancellor to the over 36,000-student campus community, expressing sorrow at another student gone. All of those messages omitted the cause of death, with one exception.
Woodson did mention suicide in a February 12 email to the campus, revealing that a student had died that weekend, shortly after two other students had died “from what police believe were natural causes.”
Privately, before that email went out, communications staffers scrambled to write a draft and get student-affairs officials to sign off before it went to the chancellor. When Bohlander sent Woodson and Gentius the draft, he warned them that they had to move quickly, as word of the suicide was spreading on social media.
“Yes, this is the right tone and message,” the chancellor replied. “It’s so unfortunate and sad.” About two hours later, the announcement landed in university-email inboxes.
“Because it was already broadly being discussed in the community, the team decided it would be appropriate in that case to just be upfront,” Bohlander, who is now at the University of Denver, told The Chronicle in an interview. (Gentius, the chief of staff, is leaving N.C. State this summer to serve as secretary for the Wake Forest University Board of Trustees).
Guidelines from the Higher Education Mental Health Alliance advise that messages to the campus should only confirm a death as a suicide if the family approves, and if designated officials decide that leaving out the information would be “disingenuous,” possibly because the death was very public or the community is widely aware of the suicide. N.C. State’s counseling director was involved in creating the guide.
Outside experts familiar with the N.C. State case say the university followed those best practices throughout its response. For instance, the university did not name the students when it sent out the campuswide email notifications, and it contacted the deceased students’ deans and professors beforehand.
Still, every decision wasn’t cut-and-dry.
On April 27, after two students died by suicide within a day of each other, Woodson sent another mournful email to the campus. This time, it didn’t mention the cause of death but encouraged readers to intervene if they sensed a friend was struggling.
A few hours before the email was sent, in comments on the draft, Bohlander asked his colleagues if he could remove the detail that both students had apparently died by suicide. Instead, he suggested the email allude to “two tragic student deaths in the last 24 hours.”
Bohlander then sent the draft to the director of the counseling center, with a note about the urgency to get something out: “Lack of a university/leadership message would seem tone deaf and frustrate the community.” The university ultimately went with the generic language.
Amid the spate of deaths, Bohlander told The Chronicle, students asked for more and more details. The university intentionally chose to limit communications.
“Some students wanted to be notified every time there was a student death,” he said. “I think that’s really changed on campuses in the last 10 years.”
While students’ desire for information about their peers’ deaths is not new, the way students talk about mental health has changed, as has the digital ecosystem colleges are up against.
Gary Glass, director of the counseling center at Oxford College of Emory University, said that students today are more activist-minded, and that their shock and grief at a peer’s death can sometimes translate into anger at their institution. Instagram accounts and Change.org petitions can amplify students’ outrage quickly.
The disposition toward activism “is playing a larger role when it collides with the inevitable emotional reactions to know[ing] that someone died at an age that most folks aren’t dying,” Glass said.
Colleges, meanwhile, are practicing greater discretion. There’s better research out there that explains suicide clusters and how media exposure might contribute to them.
Death is difficult to talk about and respond to. That work is always going to be uncomfortable, but try to make it as comfortable as possible.
A 2020 research review published in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health journal concluded that suicide clusters are more common in people under 25 than other age brackets and that direct or indirect “social transmission” can contribute to the cluster effect.
The speed at which news becomes available online puts pressure on institutions to release information as soon as it’s verified, experts say. But the administrative wheels often aren’t able to turn as quickly as some students might like.
“Between medical examiners, between sometimes circumstances being uncertain — that can be challenging,” said Victor Schwartz, senior associate dean of wellness and student life at the City University of New York School of Medicine and an expert on college suicide prevention. “Often things are out there on social media before the school is in a position to share information, which makes it look sometimes like they’re covering things up or being withholding or not sharing information, when they’re just being careful.”
At N.C. State, officials tried to stay ahead of the curve but were sometimes delayed by police and medical-examiner investigations.
“You can never please everyone and have it be fast enough,” said Justine Hollingshead, assistant vice chancellor for academic and student affairs at N.C. State, in an interview.
The absence of official comment can feed an environment in which rumors bloom. On Reddit and other platforms frequented by college students, unverified, anonymous details about specific suicides get shared with abandon.
“Rumors can fly hundreds of times easier than they could when a lot of people working at colleges were in high school or in college,” said Tess Dishaw, a rising senior and mental-health activist at Agnes Scott College, in Georgia. “It’s a very different landscape. And that provides a lot of positive things, like it’s much easier to post about someone’s remembrance or wonderful memories, but it’s also the opposite in that there are college Instagram pages that are just posting gossip.”
Zafir Naseem, a recent graduate of the University of Maryland at College Park and a former chapter president of Active Minds, a nonprofit that promotes mental-health awareness, said curiosity about a peer’s suicide is human, and he’s felt it before. But when the conversation on social media turns to a person’s suicide, he stays away, because it can be triggering. He understands that what is one user’s rumor is another person’s tremendous loss.
“I’m sure a lot of students are also wondering, because it’s unexpected,” Naseem said. “It’s either like a shrug on the shoulders for some, but it’s also something that hits really home for a lot of other students.”
This spring, the tragedy at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette illustrated the role social media plays in both dispersing information about a suicide and activating student anger against an institution.
A student took his life on campus on April 7. Despite the fact that he died in public, which generally increases the imperative for an institution to acknowledge a death, the university did not release a statement until the next day. That message, signed by Margarita Perez, dean of students, called the student’s death “an unspeakable loss” but did not mention suicide as the cause. That angered his peers.
Another source of students’ frustration was their perception that the death was preventable.
The day before the student’s suicide, a friend called the police to report that the student had posted his desire to commit suicide on social media. When the police conducted a welfare check at his dorm room, the student denied making the social-media post and assured officers he did not plan to commit suicide. The police left. The police department told a local TV station that officers’ actions were limited by Louisiana law.
After the suicide, an Instagram account called UL Whistleblower called on students to demonstrate against the university’s response. On April 15, students gathered in silent protest, holding signs like “14 hours” and “say what it was … suicide.” The account did not respond to a request for an interview.
Following the protest, the Student Government Association passed a resolution condemning the university’s handling of the suicide and calling for improvements to its emergency-notification system and welfare-check protocols.
Jennifer Stephens, a spokeswoman for UL-Lafayette, answered questions from The Chronicle by email. Stephens said the university will not respond to “demands for transparency and details of a student or employee death” in certain circumstances.
Stephens said the university did not call the student’s death a “suicide” in its April 8 email because an official cause of death had not yet been released; family notifications were incomplete; it was not “standard practice” to use the word “suicide”; and the university was trying to maintain consistency with its announcements of other recent deaths. Three other students had died in the week before the April 7 suicide.
Contagion concerns, however, weren’t a factor in the decision not to use the word “suicide,” Stephens wrote.
Indeed, Schwartz said, colleges must get through multiple decisions that could whittle the amount of information they’re providing to the masses before they even get to the question of contagion.
“Whether the event was public or something that happened in a dorm room or off campus will have an impact on decision-making about what to share, how much to share, sometimes even with whom to share,” he said.
A public suicide may necessitate a college sharing more about “location and method,” Schwartz said. “If it was in the dorm room, absolutely no reason to share it,” he added.
Schwartz and Glass said the size of a campus community also influences colleges’ decision-making around how much to disseminate, and with whom, after a suicide.
For example, what would work for a “small city” like N.C. State would not necessarily map well onto a small campus like Oxford College, Glass said.
“Communication to that many people out of necessity has to be simplified, because the impact — with such a diverse campus where you can’t actually have much of an impact on how people are affected by the communication — requires much, much more caution,” he said. “Whereas I’m on a campus with less than 1,000 students. I walk across campus, and everybody knows who I am. And so any communication that comes out is going to be far more relational.”
Students will continue to put pressure on colleges to get the conversation about suicide right.
In the spring of 2023, Sadie Schaecher was a high-school junior and mental-health advocate involved with the organization Active Minds. Hailing from Chapel Hill, Schaecher had a lot of friends at nearby N.C. State and was aware of the suicide cluster there.
At the time, Schaecher and her classmates were in the middle of college searches. She hadn’t before heard of campus mental health being a factor in people’s college decisions, but now it was. (Some institutions have struggled to shake off reputations as suicide hotbeds following clusters there.)
“With the clusters, everybody was focused on, ‘Maybe I don’t want to go to the N.C. State program that’s having all these problems,’” Schaecher said. “‘Or maybe I want to be paying attention to which colleges I’m looking at have mental-health support and which maybe don’t.’”
In Raleigh, even her friends on the university’s campus who didn’t know any of their peers who had died were steeped in the collective grief.
“The thing about those kinds of occurrences is that whether or not the person is in your major or in your classes, you always know them somehow,” Schaecher said. “That’s the thing about a school — you have some sort of connection, especially when it’s happening in a cluster.”
If colleges could explain the reasoning for their communications practices to students and staff members before a tragedy occurs, that could help set expectations for the information they will or won’t provide if the worst happens, experts note.
At N.C. State, educating student media and individual academic colleges on the guidelines the university was following “helped to calm things down,” said Hollingshead, the student-affairs official. “But I think it also helped to set what people could expect and for them to realize we weren’t sweeping something under the rug.”
Hollingshead said the university, in collaboration with the suicide-prevention-focused JED Foundation, has halved the size of the group of staffers who get initial notifications after a student suicide. And those emails no longer include cause of death.
“We decided that it was a good idea to review and evaluate what departments, units, and offices were being included and why,” Hollingshead wrote in a follow-up email. “From a best-practice standpoint, our approach was that each entity needed to provide either administrative support in the process and/or identify high-risk individuals/groups. This allowed us to be more intentional about who was being included, and we were able to decrease the size.”
In the interview, she said it’s important for all levels of the campus community, from the student up to the chief executive, to understand the protocol for communications after a death.
“Death is difficult to talk about and respond to,” she said. “That work is always going to be uncomfortable, but try to make it as comfortable as possible.”
If you are experiencing thoughts of suicide, you can call or text the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or text “HOME” to the Crisis Text Line at 741741. Both services are free, private, and available 24 hours a day and seven days a week.
