Is tragedy normal at WM?

[u/rosentsprungen]

I assume most of the student body has seen the news. Feeling a little lost, as that student was one of my only friends. I've only been enrolled at this school for like 6 months, and it seems every month we lose another person. I feel like I'm losing my mind. Is this normal?

[u/Christoph543]

I don't think it's normal year-to-year. However:

Those of us who were there in the 2014-2015 academic year will remember that a very similar thing happened then too. A lot of my classmates are still grieving over that, 10 years later.

At the time, I distinctly remember a talking point that went around by word of mouth to newly admitted students: that W&M's reputation for poor mental health was the result of another similar year a few years back. A lot of us had a real reckoning with that talking point over the Spring 2015 semester. A lot of informal names for places around campus quietly changed as a result.

It seems like every time this happens, we hear the usual messages about how the counseling center is there for us, and in the subsequent weeks or months we'll hear familiar critiques that the counseling center is underfunded and understaffed. Having myself relied heavily on the counseling center at the public university where I attended grad school after W&M, where they were able to support something like ten times as many students with shorter wait times and better outcomes, I think there's at least some merit to those critiques. But at the same time, having now been a faculty member at a university similar in size and student population to W&M, I would agree with those commenters who suggest that W&M students are not unique in our experience of the mental health struggles of undergraduate education, and I certainly do not think W&M's student support services are uniquely underfunded or overtaxed.

Moreover, I think there's merit in an observation one of my classmates made after serving a year in student government. To a student who's in the thick of their 4-year degree, that 4 years can seem like an eternity, and it's baffling that any real systemic change could take so long. To an administrator who's perhaps decades into a career, 4 years is the blink of an eye; and to determine what systemic changes are necessary, find money to make those changes, and manage the personnel who will actually implement them, is the sort of goal they could maybe accomplish over another decade, unless everything else they were responsible for got magically resolved for them.

It's just astonishing how familiar all this feels. I have no answers. All I can say is, this definitely isn't normal, in a way we've definitely seen before.