By Alyson St. Amand
In 1998, Jed Satow, 20, a sophomore at the University of Arizona, committed suicide. Six months later, his fraternity brother, Jon Goodsten, did the same. In the fall of 2003, three students from New York University all committed suicide within several weeks of each other.
According to Inteli-Health, Harvard Medical School’s consumer health information Web site, suicide is the third leading cause of death among the 15 to 24 age group, after accidents and homicides. For college students specifically, it is the second leading cause of death after accidents. Ron Gabori, Satow’s best friend and former fraternity president at the time of his death, said that he struggled for answers. If you take anything a college student can die from and compare it to suicide, the impact of a suicide on a community is the greatest, he said. But Gabori and other students were not sure where to find the resources they needed to learn about suicide and mental health.
“It’s not the fact that the universities do not have the resources,” Gabori said. “It’s that the students aren’t aware of them.”
With the help of Gabori and Heather Paley, a former Northeastern student and good friend of Satow’s, Phillip and Donna Satow founded the Jed Foundation in 2000 in honor of their son. The non-profit organization is dedicated to reducing youth suicide and improving mental health resources on college campuses in conjunction with the www.ulifeline.org Web site launched in the fall of 2001. The Web site, Gabori said, is helping to bridge the gap between awareness and the college community in an online environment for anonymity.
Initially created for the University of Arizona, the Web site provides students with various health information and links students directly to the different health and safety Web sites the campus provided to its students.
Paley said 125 colleges and universities around the country are using this Web site, which is customized to the needs of the individual college to reflect the policy and procedures of its mental health resources. Over 1.3 million students have logged on with their college IDs.
In partnership with Intelihealth, the site is customized with the schools’ logo and colors, allows students to download information about various mental illnesses, drugs and other health related topics, ask questions, make appointments and seek help anonymously via the Internet.
The “Go Ask Alice” section answers about 1,500 questions weekly from college and high school students, parents, teachers and adults on questions concerning relationships, sexuality, sexual and emotional health, fitness and nutrition, and drugs.
There is no registration fee and the school can request to be added to the Web site by contacting the Jed Foundation. Northeastern is not currently on this site.
“We ask in return that the university raise the awareness. We want the students to be aware of the sources,” Gabori said.
For more information, please contact The Jed Foundation at (212) 343-0016 or at [email protected].
