An Open Letter to College Students on Suicide

The collegiate epoch is, understandably, ridden with stress and confusion. Nothing quite prepares you for it; not the incessant and irritatingly light-hearted college prep books nor the conspicuously censored stories from your parents' experiences. Buzzfeed articles, littered with topical gifs and vague advice on not gaining too much weight your freshman year, are more of a hindrance than a help and you'll quickly find that that romanticized college atmosphere born of listicles is a myth conjured to justify the inordinate amount of stress that will be thrust upon you.

This is not an attempt to scare you or dissuade you from coming to college. Quite the opposite, actually. I want you to be prepared for the veritable shitstorm that is bound to tear through your psyche at the first mention of "the rest of your life" and inevitably find its way through an advisor's or professor's lips. It may seem petty and, frankly, a bit melodramatic that something as vague and in the future as, well, your future, could cause such a mental crisis. But make no mistake, stress can cause turmoil and, at its very worst, can kill.

In a recent piece by the New York Times, Julie Scelfo investigates the growing number of suicides on college campuses across the United States. Among the profiled schools, my own university finds a significant place, due in part to the highly publicized disappearance and eventual tragic discovery of Anna Smith last year. In addition to Smith, the university faced two more tragedies in the form of suicide. But Appalachian State was not alone in its grief.

Ms. Holleran was the third of six Penn students to commit suicide in a 13-month stretch, and the school is far from the only one to experience a so-called suicide cluster. This school year, Tulane lost four students and Appalachian State at least three — the disappearance in September of a freshman, Anna M. Smith, led to an 11-day search before she was found in the North Carolina woods, hanging from a tree. Cornell faced six suicides in the 2009-10 academic year. In 2003-4, five New York University students leapt to their deaths.

To make matters worse, suicide rates among the 15-24 years-old age range are on the rise, "from 9.6 deaths [in 2007] per 100,000 to 11.1, in 2013." In addition, college counselors have seen an increase in psychological issues among students.

But a survey of college counseling centers has found that more than half their clients have severe psychological problems, an increase of 13 percent in just two years. Anxiety and depression, in that order, are now the most common mental health diagnoses among college students, according to the Center for Collegiate Mental Health at Penn State.

Why are we losing our peers to depression and suicide? Obviously, there's no solid and satisfying answer to the age-old question of what causes this sort of melancholy reaction to life. It's wrapped in layers of nature and nurture that no one is really qualified to make a blanket statement about. It's individual to each and every person and to try and explain it is futile. That being said, there are some interesting insights on what, precisely, it feels like to be one of these confusingly suicidal individuals. Namely, the feeling of falling short.

The author of the article posits that depression often befalls people not who have nothing, but those who have had something and lost it. This discrepancy acts as a gauge by which we judge ourselves and our seemingly hopeless attempts at pulling ourselves towards our idealistic goals. In this line of thought, it's easy to see why a college freshmen with their sights set on medical school might fall into a deep depression upon that first C. Things that would ordinarily be met with a slight bout of irritation or disappointment are instead blown into stratospheric proportions, making people question the validity of their lives.

Is there something or someone to blame here? Perhaps, but to point fingers is an exercise in presumption, and forgoes the sacred process of critical thought. Personally, I think the societal expectations thrust upon incoming (and, indeed, returning) college students play a large role in creating this self-imposed ideal for how one should tackle college. The never-ending tide of college do's and don't's fashion a narrative by which many believe they must adhere to, effectively rendering perspective impotent in the wake of expectation.

Which, I suppose, is my main point. Expectation is the death of contentedness. It rips apart any sort of small happiness you may find in every day life and shoves it under the microscope, forcing you to look at your perceived failures. Expectation takes the form of candy-coated, peppy optimism about the college experience to-be. Even the asinine and oft-touted phrase "college experience" reeks of lofty expectations and inevitable disappointment.

But disappointment is good. These thoughts should not be taken as nihilistic omens for a wholly depressing future. On the contrary, they should be of some relief. I want you to know that you can fail, and do so miserably, without the fear that life as you know it will end. Because "life as you know it" is a mythology conjured by self-indulgent media outlets and the facade of your friends' impossibly interesting social media experiences.

Failure cuts through the bullshit. The disappointment accompanying it lays life as it is at your feet, warts and all. These are not enemies to your happiness, but agents of truth, designed to save you from the illusion that life, and in this case college, if going to be a constant parade of great times and endless smiles. College is going to suck at times. It's going to make you want to pack up everything and join the French Foreign Legion, without so much as a look back. You'll stumble upon worries you never thought you'd have and feel the prick of real life steadily shuffling you towards that most terrifying of leaps.

This is the way it is. And that is ok. We are all collectively tearing our hair out and agonizing over the vague future that we once thought might manifest itself some time between freshman year and graduation. But there is no magical moment of clarity, no sudden enlightenment. And to expect that it will occur is the start of a dangerous path towards despair.

I am not looking to scare. I am looking to prepare you for an easier time in college. Whether you're preparing for the first time or returning to another year, I want you to have some perspective on the whole damn comedy and realize that expectations are best trashed in favor of living honestly. And believe me, you will enjoy college. There will be cinematic moments seemingly lifted straight from pop culture. You will laugh, have a good time and lay out on the quad at least once or twice before the long winter. But with all this comes the other, less spritely element. Rather than push it to the side, I want to lay it in front of you so that when it rears its head in your own life, you will greet it with a nod rather than a scream.

Three students took their lives on Appalachian State's campus this past year. Whether they were victims of college's lofty expectations or their own demons, we may never know. What I do know is that nothing in college is worth taking your life over and that for all its stress and overwhelming nature, its still just a small facet of life in general. I'm sure you've heard that one before, though.

The Morality of Trophy Hunting

Today in "fuck this asshole in particular," America has begun the sacred process of vilification of a dentist from Minnesota for allegedly "hunting" and beheading a lion in Zimbabwe as part of a trophy hunt. The dentist, Dr. Walter J. Palmer, reportedly paid $54,000 to hunt and kill the lion, known affectionately as Cecil by the locals.

But trophy hunting happens all the time. It's legal in many African countries (Zimbabwe and Tanzania being the biggest) and attracts millions of dollars from all over the globe, namely America. Why the outrage? Why the calls for Palmer's head? Why are we fucking this asshole in particular? Well, for starters, almost nothing about this hunt was ethical (not to mention legal) by any standards. As the story goes, Palmer and his hired guides wandered into one of Zimbabwe's national parks and found Cecil, ripe for the killing. Knowing that killing the lion on the grounds of the park would be highly illegal, they decided to utilize a loophole and lure the lion out of the park using a dead animal tied to their vehicle. Once Cecil was safely out of safety, Palmer shot him with a bow and arrow, wounding him. They tracked Cecil and eventually shot and killed him, proceeding to behead and skin him and leaving the carcass behind.

Right about now, there are two different possible reactions. Depending on this reaction, you can either find out if you're a sociopathic rectal cavity or a decent human being. You either see this as a tragedy or "just part of life." The latter reactionaries are the same ilk that buy into the idea that trophy hunting is all hunky dory and that selling off animal lives to the highest bidder is some convoluted way of helping struggling animal populations. Remember Kendall Jones from, like, a fucking year ago? The Texas cheerleader, known for posing with dead animals that she ostensibly shot and killed, gained a whole host of negative media attention when her pictures went viral. Her ordeal briefly brought the conversation of conservation (I'm sorry) to the forefront of everyone's mind before it inevitably slipped into obscurity in favor of whatever pissed us off next in July 2014.

But the conversation needs continuing. Conservation efforts are incredibly important, particularly in a time where we, as a species, are encroaching on literally every habitat on the planet and knocking over trees so that we can....marvel at how many trees we knocked over? I'm still fuzzy on the details. At any rate, trophy hunting is a good place to start. Is it good? Is it bad? Is it more complicated than that? I imagine the answer is "fuck, I have to think about this?" Luckily for you, I've done a good bit of the thinking for you.

For starters, why do people claim that trophy hunting is beneficial in the first place? The most commonly touted reasons are that it A) allows for more regulation of land that would otherwise see the aforementioned human encroachment, and B) garners millions of dollars in revenue for places that are in dire need of it. On face value, these both seem to be fairly rational justifications for sport hunting. No one can deny that one of the biggest ways to help conservation is to make sure it has enough money to fight back against....whatever the opposite of conservation is. Hunting? Maybe I'm splitting hairs.

But how much of that money actually goes into local communities and conservation efforts? A paltry amount, according to some. In fact, according to a study conducted at the University of Oxford, only an estimated 3-5% of revenue from trophy hunting in Tanzania is actually given back to the community. The opposition argues that eco-tourism is a far more profitable method of utilizing Africa's great animals for monetary gain. And these aren't just PETA-addled eco-terrorists that think this. Many African countries, including Kenya and Botswana have implemented countrywide bans on trophy hunting of big game.

The assertion that trophy hunting is beneficial to the survival and thriving of its victim populations is specious at best, relying on self-reported statistics and mythological narratives cooked up by people who want to keep firing rounds into animals that are really just trying to avoid being seen by all these fucking people. Admittedly, in an article in the University of Washington's Conservation magazine, the authors argue that outrage over trophy hunting, while sordid, is simply a distraction from the real problem: illegal poaching. The authors admit, albeit begrudgingly, that trophy hunters are at least more in line with conservation efforts than their criminal counterparts.

But this sort of backwards logic is similar to justifying paying a $5 fee to punch old ladies in the face because, hey, at least you're paying for their dental. I understand that not every trophy hunter is gleefully kicking down the proverbial door, guns a-blazing, but at the same time, I have yet to see any strong evidence of real benefit stemming from the practice of hunting for sport. There are better ways of attracting tourists, better ways of drumming up profit and much better ways of conserving species.

Dr. Palmer is an asshole, without question. He purposefully led a lion (being tracked with a GPS collar that he and his guides attempted to destroy, no less) from its protected habitat so that he could shoot it for the sole purpose of telling his asshole friends that he did. This may not be characteristic of the trophy hunting population as a whole, but I would hazard a guess that it is not a rare personality trait among them. The über-rich shelling out hundreds of thousands each to murder for sport rubs me very much in the wrong way. Its purported benefits aside, there is a deeply moral issue here that cannot be ignored or misdirected. It's indicative of a society that truly believes itself superior to animal-kind, claiming divine dominion over living beings not endowed with the gift of speech and opposable thumbs.

There's still more room for debate here, and I urge you to research on your own. Maybe there are untold benefits and maybe I'm being reactive. But from where I stand, the whole thing reeks of moral depravity.