William & Mary's 4th suicide this year raises concerns

Thursday was supposed to be opening night, when Paul Soutter, a sophomore at the College of William and Mary, would be onstage in a student-written play about how the stresses college students face can break them.

People instead will gather for his funeral at a church in Arlington, where he grew up.

Soutter took his life early Monday, according to officials at the esteemed liberal arts college in Williamsburg. Those who knew and loved him described Soutter as an outstanding student and a brilliantly funny friend, and his death resonated deeply in this close-knit campus community, raising concerns about the challenges college students handle on a daily basis and the mental health struggles students can face.

It was the fourth suicide at William and Mary this year and the eighth since 2010, a relatively high number for a school that has 8,400 undergraduate and graduate students. Soutter's passing seemed a tipping point for many students and alumni, who asked why yet another high-achieving young person has been lost and whether there weren't better ways to ease stress and help people in emotional crisis.

William and Mary is among many elite U.S. campuses now struggling with this issue, with high-profile ongoing conversations at Yale, MIT, the University of Pennsylvania and many others.

"I don't know what he was dealing with," said Tess Higgins, a senior who spent the past two years working on the play in which Soutter was a principal actor, and she probably never will truly know, she said. But she hopes the themes of the play might help bring some light to the crushing stresses some students feel. Attempts to reach Soutter's family through the university and family friends on Wednesday were unsuccessful.

On Wednesday, students, faculty and others gathered for an emotional campus memorial, remembering Soutter's kindness to friends, his theater roles, his funny improv performances, his unexpected insights. They plan to have another gathering next week, with counselors available.

There was an e-mail widely shared on campus, Higgins said, in which a grieving student asked for an extension on a test and the professor responded with sympathy but no extra time. Her own professors were wonderfully accommodating, she added, and a school spokesman shared an e-mail the provost sent to faculty urging them to be compassionate. Still, it was symbolic of the kinds of pressure she worries about.

"We should be encouraged to take risks and fail gloriously," Higgins said. "If we can't do it here, then where can we do it?"

Many students and alumni had similar reactions.

"I don't even attend William and Mary anymore, and I still feel like I'm holding my breath everyday, waiting for the next death," Noa Nir, a 2013 graduate who works at the Institute of Medicine, wrote in an email to The Washington Post. "I don't know — I cannot presume to know — why these students chose to take their own lives.

"But maybe, just maybe, it had to do with a feeling of worthlessness, of suffocation, of loneliness. This is what I felt, to a lesser extent, during my time on campus. I felt the need to constantly prove myself — the need to show that I belonged to this renowned college and was worthy of both its academics and its people. I know what it's like to have to keep up — and to feel like a failure when I don't."

Kelly Crace, associate vice president for health and wellness at the college, cautioned that it is easy to over-connect academic stress and the risk of suicide; he said it is actually a low predictor of suicidal feelings. The best predictor is a long history of mental health issues, he said.

Crace said the school has been adding more resources for students who are struggling with mental health issues, with thousands of students taking advantage of resiliency training, as one example. Crace said the school received additional funding from the Virginia General Assembly to add services such as an after-hours call center and a full-time psychiatrist.

Gregg Robertson, the principal of Arlington's Washington-Lee High School, said Soutter was talented and smart, quiet and very funny: "Paul was a terrific student!"

Bill Chamblee, a physics teacher at Washington-Lee, called Soutter a "Renaissance man" who studied intensified physics and Advanced Placement Physics and excelled at theater. "He had a broad spectrum of interests and likewise a broad spectrum of friends," he said.

Higgins, still shocked and overwhelmed, said the play at William and Mary that Soutter was to perform in certainly won't happen this week.

But his friends might, if Soutter's family agrees, honor him by staging a reading with counselors on hand as a means to spark conversation about these issues and asking for help.

Higgins said Soutter had one of her favorite lines in the play, when his character tells another character not to allow school culture to drown her, to celebrate the person she truly is:

"Getting only one hour of sleep is a badge of pride because you worked so hard. But it's not. Maggie, you want all these pride badges that mean nothing. I like you without your trophies and your test scores; I like you in your sweatpants! But you don't like that girl. And to me, that is a tragedy."

Higgins said she wishes he could share those lines on stage: "It really breaks my heart that he's not here to say them."