Suicide watch might be necessary.

Five words. Just five words blazed into existence on the harsh glow of my phone screen, texted to me by my best friend.

It was 2 am, a school night—only two weeks after the first undergraduate suicide of the year. And for a full minute, I held my breath, my emotions suspended, as I let the full message sink in.

What was he saying? What did he mean suicide? But I knew exactly what he meant. I knew that in the past few weeks he had begun an intense downward spiral in his mental health after a horrible break up with his long-distance girlfriend. And I knew that self-inflicted harm was not a foreign thought to him.

I held my breath until I could hold it no longer. And then. My world toppled with the incapacitating thought that if it all ended, it would be because I hadn’t done enough to save him.

Thank god this story did not end in death. When I regained my composure, I scrambled to his room and put him on the phone with Mental Health. After several sessions, the appropriate medication, and copious amounts of time, he recovered his mental and emotional health. But not everyone is this lucky.

There were two apparent suicides at MIT last week, adding to four others confirmed in the past twelve months. And this affliction is not unique to MIT. Last year, there were four confirmed cases at Penn and in the past six months, there have been suspected suicides at Columbia, Princeton, Dartmouth, Yale, Stanford. All of these people had personalities, friends, families. And yet all of them have become statistics because suicides at elite institutions are no longer an anomaly. High rates of depression have become the norm.

This is not right. There must be a solution.

My sophomore year I began my own battle with depression. It crept up so slowly that at first I attributed it to stress over my schoolwork. Then I attributed it to mood swings from my sleep deprivation. Then it was disappointments over my grades, emotional anxiety from my relationship, strained relations with my parents. I told myself over and over it’ll go away, it’s just a phase. But then several months passed. I stopped seeing friends, stopped attending commitments, lost motivation to do anything but sleep, hoping that when I woke up, everything would be better. I had run out of excuses. All the causes I had attributed to my depressive moods had become the effects. I was already several months into my depression when the realization slammed into me full-force: something was seriously wrong.

Everyone’s depression is deeply personal. I cannot speak for everyone and I won’t. But for me the scariest part of depression wasn’t the isolation. It wasn’t the mornings I could barely get up or the nights I had to cry myself to exhaustion before I could sleep. It wasn’t even the thought that it may never end, that there may never be a light at the end of the tunnel. The most terrifying, crippling sensation of my depression was looking myself in the mirror and not being able to recognize who I was anymore. Things that I considered an integral part of my identity — emotional articulation, mental control, academic success, resilience — were all gone. Emotions and thoughts that I no longer recognized would seize me unpredictably, and I would lay in my bed incapable of doing anything, hoping and praying that all these thoughts would pass and I would come out intact. I think fundamentally this is what depression stems from. A lack of self-understanding. A lack of self-acceptance. And eventually a lack of self-worth.

I told no one. Every day, I plastered on a well-practiced smile and went about my routines because it was too hard to speak about it. Not because I was scared of people thinking I was weak. But because I didn’t think anyone would understand. To this day I remember overhearing someone say about another peer, “I can’t get any work done when she’s depressed all the time,” and vowing then to never be the subject of that sentiment. The thought of finally opening up and then having nothing come of it was devastating. Besides, how could someone understand my depression? Something so intimately tied to every little detail of my life, every subtle facet of my personality. Something that I didn’t even understand myself.

But I was lucky. Even without telling him, my best friend noticed. The same best friend that texted me suicidal thoughts two years later. During my depression, he never tried to understand my battle. Instead he was simply just there, to laugh with me during my good moods and to steady me when I couldn’t see the light. I learned from him that that’s what I needed most. Not someone who asked me how I was doing in passing — because it’s much easier to say “I’m good” than not — but someone who had seen me through my best and worst and average days, truly understood me, and could be my rock when I no longer understood myself.

This is how we fail at MIT and at other institutions that drive students and professors to work harder and faster and longer. In the tumultuous schedule of everyone’s lives, we will use the little time we have to celebrate with people during their successes and sometimes cry with them during their failures, but we forget to be there for their day to day. So that when something subtle like depression begins to affect someone’s life, it goes unnoticed, and then the burden of reaching out falls onto the affected individual, the one person whose symptoms — apathy and a lack of motivation — actually work against his or her ability to do so.

During sorority recruitment, when we speak to girls about the benefits of joining the Greek life community, we often like to say “Friends are there for you when you’re laughing; sisters are there for you when you’re crying.” When did we suddenly become complacent with such low expectations for our friends?

How do we overcome this culture of touch-and-go friendships and foster a community filled with more meaningful relationships? We can push ourselves to be more present in our relationships and be more proactive about looking out for each other, but if the underlying culture does not change, this is not a sustainable model. Instead we need to think about the systemic changes that could really have a positive long term impact.

At MIT, this culture embodies the perception that work takes higher priority than friends or health. This is sometimes fueled just by the nature of our classes, with problem sets due between 3 and 6 a.m. or misleading units. As much as we’d like to say that students are capable of managing their own time and avoiding procrastination, deadlines set during sleeping hours ultimately send the message that academic performance is more important than health. And although we’d like to think that mischaracterizing units — the tendency to mask 24 unit classes as 12 unit ones — is just a semantical difference, it systematically leads students to overload, driven by the need to reach the minimum units for graduation or to stay on financial aid.

Even the attitudes that professors hold unintentionally propagate this culture. A joke in lecture about students pulling an all-nighter for the next problem set. A few words encouraging students to make one last push for the deadline. All these incidents and the above practices are nearly harmless taken individually—but when students hear these sentiments and are subject to these deadlines over and over again, they collectively insinuate the message that no cost is too high for serious work.

Students are no better. We perpetuate this culture viciously. As we welcome prefrosh during CPW, we say “grades, friends, sleep: pick two” and teach them that the choice is actually obvious: work hard, play hard, sleep later; then we go to extreme measures to hold events from morning to night in the middle of our own hell weeks just to prove that point. During the school year, we elevate those who take an ungodly number of classes, revere those who juggle extracurricular activities left and right. We say “sleep is for the weak” and glorify all-nighters. We belittle other schools that don’t boast the same workload. We are so caught up in our pride that we don’t realize the toll it takes on us. When we’re suddenly confronted with an overwhelming amount of work, asking for an extension makes us feel incompetent. When we’re psetting late into the night with a group, being the first to leave makes us feel incapable. When our peers brag about their commitments, having fewer makes us feel inadequate. And the most ironic consequence is, when we are actually sleeping a healthy number of hours and still have time to socialize, we feel like we are not doing enough.

Suddenly, time is limited, stress is high, and the sheer fact that we are human is working against us because we are biologically programmed to shut down under low sleep and high stress. After just one all-nighter or several days of restricted (3–5 hours) sleep, our cognitive functions slow down, including attention, memory retention, and alertness; our immune system weakens as cortisol levels rapidly drop; and our emotional stability and control decline until we are teetering on the precipice of depression. And then we do the one thing that we shouldn’t to try and overcome these symptoms: we push ourselves to work even harder.

This culture, this state of being is an unlikely foundation for forming and strengthening relationships. And as social creatures, without such relationships, we cease to cope.

There is a light. Productive change can happen. All the small gestures that we do, which unintentionally facilitate high stress and fragile relationships, can be reversed. It won’t be easy. But it is actionable. Professors should be more mindful of deadlines for assignments; they should proactively empower students to ask for help when they need it, whether it’s simply going to office hours or asking for an extension and speaking to S^3; they should refrain from comments that propagate the idea that loss of sleep for work is expected or even acceptable. Administrators should rethink policies that lead to systematic overloading, such as setting the same unit cap on all courses instead of addressing each course on a case-by-case basis. Finally we as students should stop glorifying all-nighters and workloads that are larger than life; we should expel the belief that work-life balance is impossible and that our youth is expendable; we should empower ourselves to recognize when we have reached our limits and need to take a step back. Most of all, all of us — professors, administrators, and students alike — should work to be more present in our relationships, so that we can foster a truly safe and supportive community.

There are so many more words to say about mental health and depression at MIT and at other universities. So many more stories to tell, changes to urge. But after months of contemplation, triggered by the suicides earlier this year, I chose this theme because I truly believe mindful togetherness is the most fundamental request we can ask of each other.

Part of me is terrified to speak out because I am afraid that nothing will change. This article will be just another file, stored away in the archives of the internet. But I’d like to think I’m brave. And I will take this risk to make a change. I hope you will make this change with me.

abridged version published in the MIT Tech