Suicide Prevention on the College Campus
My son, Adam Szychowski was a senior at the University of Connecticut when died by suicide.
Adam (2nd from left) with his best friends.
He was 23. His suicide took place during the winter mid-semester break. Adam had achieved 20 credits in the fall semester, and had made dean’s list. It was his best semester ever.
He was one of only a few students who remained on campus. He loved his apartment, and the independence of living there, and it was only a 30 minute ride to his father’s home. I had wanted him to come to Florida and spend his break with me, but he insisted that he had too much work.
There were bits of information that I did not have at the time. Adam’s stellar performance was in part due to his prescription of Ritalin. He was not only taking Ritalin, but he was taking it in excessive doses, and at times paired with alcohol. Little by little during the fall semester, he had begun to unravel mentally even as he excelled academically. Lack of sleep played a role in his unraveling.
As I look at what happened to Adam, I realize that what I have now learned could have helped me to intercede before Adam felt he had no options. He had painted himself into a corner, and he felt he had only one option.
The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention has an initiative that is focused on suicide prevention on the college campus.
Please follow the link below and support the AFSP in their efforts to prevent college student suicide.
AFSP: College Student Depression and Suicide
What Caused Adam’s Suicide?
Suicide is permanent. Yet it often occurs in a moment or moments of a temporary crisis. Someone once said that suicide occurs when someone’s pain exceeds their resources for coping with pain. During those moments when Adam contemplated suicide as a solution, his internal resources were depleted.
Maybe it seems trivial to talk about lack of sleep. But three days without sleep can bring on hallucinations and delusions. Combine lack of sleep with ritalin. And too much Ritalin at that, and you now have a medically documented suicide risk. An overdose or a sudden crash on Ritalin has been known to cause suicidal thoughts. Combine that with a glass or two of alcohol, and you have a lethal soup.
The scarey aspect of Adam’s suicide is that he was a happy person, a successful student, well liked, well loved, and had dreams and aspirations. Suicide is the 3rd leading cause of death among young people: ages 20-24, and young men are six times more likely to commit suicide than young women.
Why is that? Is it the reckless behavior that is often natural in young men? Is it the fact that they do not always confide and seek emotional support when they are grappling with an emotional crisis?
At the moment when Adam took that final action, he had no resources to cope with the pain he was in. But why was he in so much pain? We will never really know for sure, but I have my answer… and I will always believe that the combination of lack of sleep, Ritalin and alcohol created a toxic ideation and killed my son.
Why Did It Happen?
When someone asks how Adam died, I say that he took his own life.
Adam at 9 months
The silence that follows is loaded. The person is often thinking about the ‘why’ and the ‘how.’ As for the “how” – what difference does it really make. Death is never pretty. And it is our morbid curiosity that wants the details. But the ‘why.’ This is what we must ask ourselves. How else can we learn, and help to prevent it from happening again. From the first day that this tragedy occurred, I have tried to understand the reasons.
There are many layers to the answer. There is the immediate time in which his suicide took place. There are the days leading up to his suicide, and there is his entire life.
This post may take me a while to complete… because as I undertake it, I realize how difficult it is. I’ll continue this thread later.
