Editor’s note: The following is a Letter to the Editor from some students in San Diego State University’s Tenochca Hall.
Dear Editor,
Although it’s been known throughout social media such as the San Diego State parent Facebook page and the SDSU Yik Yak app, the school has had many more than just the few student mental health crisis stories you may have heard on one of these apps.
As two freshmen girls from SDSU who have been surrounded first-hand by multiple traumatic mental health events within the friend group, and seeing no help offered by the school, we feel that it is important to get this inside information out and to let the students and parents of San Diego State know that this problem is much greater than you may hear.
We both live in Tenochca Hall at State and share the same circle of friends. In just the past couple recent months in our friend group alone, there have been four situations where our friends have tried to commit suicide in front of us. Each time this has happened, it was more and more scarring for us and the rest of our friend group involved.
As we dug deeper, we found a few common factors: frats, alcohol, and they are all women.
This doesn’t mean there is to say that men around the campus are not experiencing these crises as well, but just from personal experience, women having these issues seem to have a significantly higher rate. Every time one of these events happened the police have shown up and our friends were taken to the hospital, however, what we found out later was that three of the four times in which our friends were sent to the hospital, their reports for reason of why they were there was under the title of ‘INTOXICATION’ rather than ‘ATTEMPTED SUICIDE’.
Because of these titles, the school was able to pick and choose ‘intoxication’ over ‘attempted suicide’ for their reports which is an obvious lie. This is also why students aren’t getting as much mental health help as we should because more than half of these situations just between the four events we know of have been mislabeled.
Not only that, but because frats have been part of the issue involving the reasoning for these attempts, we also tried to report one of them and have it shut down. The process was a struggle as the school makes it very difficult to shut frats down since their fraternities and sororities give them so much funding.
We were asked to give out all of our information along with our friend who made the suicide attempts information in order to make a report. This left us with no choice but to stop our report as we didn’t want to give out her information and ‘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 of these girls came home from the hospital, they were told they did not have to attend class for a few days and teachers would be contacted, but that did not happen. Teachers were annoyed by the situation and even when a personal email was sent by each girl, they would get a response allowing work to be turned in a few days late and exemptions from lack of attendance.
Later, these teachers would ‘forget’ and still mark late work, missing exams, and absences.
Because of this, it made it almost impossible for these girls to get back to school and do well on their work. No one could help them no matter who it was with their cases on our campus.
What happened to these girls now you might ask? Well they all except one unenrolled and dropped out with just a few months left of the semester. This also doesn’t help our parents and new incoming parents know the reality of living in the dorms of SDSU. This is just from our unfortunate experiences (which should not be normal for a college student here) from just our floor in Tenochca Hall, let alone the rest of the campus that we don’t know about.
What is going on with this attempted suicide epidemic of San Diego State and where is the help we all need that we’ve been searching for?
Sincerely,
Some concerned residents of Tenochca Hall, SDSU
- Editor’s note: We reached out to SDSU and got the following response:
Upon checking with the Office of Housing Administration, the San Diego State University Police Department (UPD), and the Dean of Students Office, there are no such records/reports. It is important to note that under the umbrella of prioritizing a student’s mental health and overall well-being, in addition to SDSU’s Counseling & Psychological Services which has some of the highest student to counselor ratios within the California State University system, the university provides a number of other direct student support services, including the university’s Campus Assistance, Response, Evaluation, and Support (CARES) team, the dedicated Economic Crisis Response Team (ECRT) and Well-being and Health Promotion programs and services. This is a mere sampling of what is offered campus-wide in support of students’ mental health and well-being, and many are available 24/7.
