“Staring at a razor,” another user wrote, “trying to work up the courage.”

Then, “Tell me your real name so we can talk in person.” And “It’s going to be O.K. This is awful but don’t make it worse.” And “If you need someone to talk to, counseling services and the chaplain’s office is available 24/7.”

I screened these posts in futility. At practically 30, I was too removed from their world to be of any help; I pretend I know their lives, but I can only remember how it felt to feel so alone, how nothing amplifies a grief like the insistence of another grief.

Ohio is a tricky place. The land itself is beautiful: sprawling prairie and caverns that dip deep into the earth. But if there is one thing I can say about Ohio, it is that nowhere I’ve lived possesses such a sense of transitoriness. Never have I seen so many 18-wheelers. The roads seem less like roads than interconnected pads of money strapped down to vehicles, crates of humidifiers and entertainment sets and steam vacuums and Ikea furniture. Accent tables. Budweiser beer.

Always there is the reminder that the world lives somewhere else. Our county is vibrant, and yet we are surrounded by closing coal mines and empty factories. What is not collapsing is sprouting strip malls, tanning salons, another gym. Ohioans are also dying from opioid overdoses at a higher rate than anywhere else in the country, which is truly saying something. At least 23 Ohioans die from heroin overdoses each week — so many that some coroner’s offices are requesting cold-storage trailers to use as makeshift morgues.

Ohioans take their lives primarily by guns, then by hanging, then by poison. Between 2000 and 2015, more than 20,000 Ohioans died by suicide. One every seven hours. A Columbus Dispatch investigation found that the youngest were 8 years old.

So who can blame my students for trying to connect, even if anonymously?

Over the past decade, I’ve worked at four colleges, and everywhere is the same: counseling offices are hard to get to, their clinicians overwhelmed, their hours limited and the implications of using them — of exposure and prescriptions and hasty diagnoses — are things only to be feared. Years ago, a student came to my office to tell me she was planning to kill herself, that she’d rid herself of all her belongings, even giving up her cat, and I asked her to wait while I phoned counseling services. The voice mail said the office closed at 3 and would be open the next day at noon. I looked at the student, who told me, “I don’t think I will be alive by then.”