Seven deaths: How one university weathered an unthinkable mental health crisis

“Are you burned out,” I asked.

Her face was flat. “I still am,” she said. “Yes. Yes, and I still am.”

Worchester is famous for the snow deposits it receives in winter. It has something to do with the city's location in relation to the Appalachians. The clouds descend as the temperature drops, and then the snow is relentless and the weather is brutal. All winter long it's brutal, brutal, brutal, and somehow, slowly, it isn't anymore. That's pretty much how the end of the WPI crisis came. No one I spoke to could explain exactly how they knew the emergency was over; the most they could be sure of was that at some point in the spring of 2022 they intuitively felt that the final death was behind them. Between summer 2021 and winter 2022, the faculty was in suspension. “We were always waiting, waiting for the next one – if there was a next one,” Foo said. “It's like waiting for the other shoe to drop.” But sometime deep into winter, she said, it became clear it was over. There was no clear dividing point, just a subtle shift. “The campus culture felt so much lighter,” she said, “like we had been through this traumatic experience, but somehow we could see the point at the end of the tunnel. Somehow something was over.”

King said she knew “it” had ended when people started looking each other in the face again sometime in the spring. For months it seemed like no one could tolerate eye contact. “With that kind of pain, you usually don't want that – when I look you in the eye, I can feel your pain.” And one day something had changed. “People started looking into my eyes, and I knew they were smiling, even though I couldn't see the smile,” she said, gesturing to the masks everyone was wearing at the time. “And I knew we were turning the corner. People looked straight into my eyes, as if they were just looking at me. And I looked at them.”

It is now clear that the mental health crisis has forever changed academia: its structures, its culture, and the function it is expected to serve in American society. More than half of American college students now report depression, anxiety or are seriously considering suicide. This is an issue that cuts across geography, race, class, identity, institutional resources or prestige, and academic ability. Nearly one in four Americans in college have considered dropping out for their mental health in the past year. Adapting pedagogy to account for this breadth of disease and, in some cases, disability, is the new frontier of postsecondary education.

In early 2022, WPI opened a large new Center for Wellness, right next to the school's main cafeteria, as if to declare that well-being is central to the school's institutional mission. By the time I visited Worcester this fall, almost all of the task force's short-term recommendations, and some from Riverside's independent review, had been implemented.