Editor’s note: The following is a letter to the editor from several students at San Diego State University’s Tenochica Hall..
To the editor,
This has been known across social media, including San Diego State’s Facebook page and the SDSU Yik Yak app, but the school is also reporting on the few student mental health crises you may have heard about on these apps. There’s more to the story than just the story.
Two incoming SDSU female students experienced multiple traumatic mental health events first-hand within their peer groups and witnessed a lack of support from the school, which led them to share this inside information with the outside world. I feel it is important to spread the word and let students know. And San Diego parents know this problem is much bigger than you’re hearing.
We both live in State Tenochica Hall and share the same friend circle. In our friend group alone, we’ve had four situations in the last few months alone where a friend tried to commit suicide right in front of us. Every time something like this happened, it became more and more of a scar for us and the rest of the friend group involved.
Digging deeper, I found some commonalities: frats, alcohol, and they were all women.
This is not to say that men on campus don’t experience these things.
Crises are similar, but from personal experience, women seem to have a much higher percentage of these issues. Every time this happened, the police came and our friends were taken to the hospital. However, I later found out that 3 out of the 4 times my friends were sent to the hospital, they were called in for reasons such as: Why they were there was titled “Addiction” instead of “Suicide Attempt.”
These titles allowed the school to select “drunkenness” as the subject of the report rather than “suicide attempt,” which is an obvious lie. This is also why students don’t receive as much mental health support as we need, as more than half of the situations between the four events we know about are mislabeled. there is.
Not only that, but we reported one of them and tried to get it closed, as the flat was part of the issue surrounding the reason for these attempts. This process was difficult because fraternities and sororities provide significant funding, making it very difficult for schools to shut down fraternities.
We were asked to provide all of our information to make a report, along with the friend who provided the suicide attempt information. Because of this, we were forced to stop reporting as we did not want to make her information public. Also, “anonymous” was not an option, even though most people in these cases would very much prefer it.
Not only that, but after the fact, when each girl returned home from the hospital, they were told that they didn’t have to attend classes for several days and that their teachers would be contacted, but that never happened. Teachers are frustrated by the situation, and even though they send personal emails to each girl, they often receive replies asking them to turn in work days late or excuse their absences.
These teachers then began marking late arrivals, missed exams, and absences even if they “forgot” them.
This made it almost impossible for them to return to school and work. Regarding their incident on our campus, no one could help them, no matter who it was.
Now you may ask, what happened to these girls? Well, all but one unenrolled and dropped out with just a few months left in the semester. It also doesn’t help our parents and new parents understand the realities of life in the dorms at SDSU. This is our unfortunate experience (I’m sure it’s not normal for college students here) just on our floor of Tenocha Hall, let alone other parts of campus that we don’t know about. ) is from.
What’s going on with the suicide attempt epidemic in San Diego State, and where is the help we’ve all been looking for?
Sincerely,
Some residents of SDSU’s Tenocha Hall are concerned.
- Editor’s note: We contacted SDSU and received the following response:
Upon checking with the Housing Authority, San Diego State University Police Department (UPD), and the Dean of Students, no such records/reports existed. In addition to SDSU’s counseling and psychological services, which have the highest student to counselor ratio in the California State University system, under the umbrella of prioritizing students’ mental health and overall well-being, the university offers: It is important to note that There are also a number of other direct student support services, including the University’s Campus Assistance, Response, Evaluation, and Support (CARES) team, a dedicated Economic Crisis Response Team (ECRT), and welfare and health promotion programs and services. This is just a sampling of the offerings across campus to support students’ mental health and wellbeing, many of which are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
