This week, a Penn student, Olivia Kong, killed herself.
Olivia is the 10th Penn student to have committed suicide in the past three years. In an email notifying the school, President Amy Gutmann wrote a meager seven sentences. Seven sentences to inform the student body that a girl was run over by a SEPTA train. Seven sentences to commemorate a life that was lost. Seven sentences to share Olivia’s complex, dark and ultimately tragic story.
In fact, in the email sent out to the College (one of the four undergraduate schools at Penn), Olivia was not even identified. Gutmann likewise neglected to mention the fact that it was Olivia who threw herself under the train, making it sound instead like she tripped or was pushed.
Suicide is a complex issue, and there’s no singular root cause, for no two stories are the same. It’s easy to criticize Penn, and to point out many of the University’s shortcomings — some of which include that the wait-time for CAPS (Counseling and Psychological Services) can sometimes be up to a month, that taking a leave of absence can not only be difficult to qualify for, but is also no longer an option past a certain point in the semester (the student would then receive a withdraw on his or her transcripts, rather than an excused incomplete), and finally that the University provides no sort of structure, support, or organization to address those affected by the death of a peer.
Ultimately, however, this issue runs deeper than just Penn — it’s a phenomenon that reaches worldwide. In fact, according to SAVE (Suicide Awareness Voices of Education), in 2014, suicide was the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S., and the second leading cause for people between the age of 15-24. Yet Gutmann could only afford seven sentences on this pressing issue.
And that’s precisely the problem — no one is talking about it.
No one talks about not being OK. We drift through life — a constant string of "hello’s" and "how are you"s — and never truthfully answer the question.
Many articles written about the suicides at Penn cite social media as being at the heart of the issue. And in many ways it is: We see edited versions of each other’s lives, judge content from behind screens where the ultimate sign of approval is a double tap, and hide the ugly truth behind pretty color-stained filters.
But perhaps social media is only a reflection of the problem. In a culture of toxic comparison and hyper-competitiveness — where you are never the smartest, prettiest, or most accomplished in the room; where you have to fight the masses of overworked students to even get a seat in the library; where your value is measured by lines on a resumé — the problem is our own. Stanford calls it Duck Syndrome, and Penn calls it Penn Face: a condition where we present our best selves, concealing our inner turmoil.
There’s a disconnect between the interior and the exterior; we show one thing, but feel another. And that’s the problem. We don’t feel comfortable bridging the gap between the two; we can't talk openly about how we actually feel; we have not deconstructed the stigma around mental health.
So as we look forward, we can assign blame on all fronts. Surely Penn has its failures, yet no party is entirely guilty. Instead, we must examine ourselves. We must push each other to be open, to be honest. We have to create the vocabulary and the context for a dialogue to form — no matter how uncomfortable. We have to be able to look inward and be able to say, I’m not OK.
