For all the emphasis that Cornell administrators put on mental health and suicide prevention, when a student does commit suicide the community is surprisingly tight-lipped about it. Between 1996 and 2006, 21 students at Cornell committed suicide, averaging about two suicides per year, which is close to the national average. However, The Sun only reported three of these.

When former Cornell student Ash Thotambilu ’06 committed suicide in 2006, the paper dedicated a mere 62 words to the story, shorter than the length of this paragraph. In 2000, two students committed suicide over the summer: The Sun reported that Jun Wang died after jumping into Fall Creek Gorge, but did not bother to reveal the name of the graduate student in mathematics who had done the same.

In the case of Thotambilu, Simeon Moss ’73, University press relations office director, declined to comment aside from confirming the death, citing the “privacy wishes of the family.” It is understandable if a grieving family wishes not to share information with the public, but the fact of the matter is that suicide is not a private act: it affects the entire web of personal associations a student cultivates as a member of the Cornell community. Yet there was no comment from University administrators, from any of Thotambilu’s friends or professors — only a faceless epitaph.

Laziness on the part of Sun news reporters is responsible for some of the hush surrounding suicide here. The unwillingness by University officials to release information — perhaps in a misguided attempt to subvert Cornell’s reputation as a “suicide school” — is also to blame. But part of it has to do with how we respond to suicide and how we think about mental illness.

When a student is felled by terminal illness or dies suddenly in an auto accident, there are public memorials, testimonials from friends — the typical rituals of mourning. But more often than in other instances, suicides call for “privacy”: uncharacteristic silence in a culture of public confession.

Historical religious and legal attitudes have typically condemned suicide. And the recognition of “mental illness” has had to contend with the American mythology of self-sufficiency. Whereas illnesses such as cancer or HIV are characterized with military metaphors—“invasion,” “fight off,” “beat” — this language is not used to describe mental illness. One does not “fend it off.” We do not say that someone who commits suicide has “succumbed to mental illness”; the pathogen is inextricable from the self. In the unexamined mind, those who commit suicide are held to be complicit in their own demise.

In opposition to these perceptions, the mental health community has made an effort to pathologize mental illness, to present depression, schizophrenia etc. as external forces that afflict a patient—and, by extension, to characterize suicide as the terminus of an untreated condition. The availability and use of pharmaceuticals to treat these conditions (and the accompanying advertising campaigns) have helped in the effort.

I do not unquestioningly believe that mental illness is caused by a chemical “imbalance,” which is not to say that the problem is not chemical: I wonder if it is possible to distinguish genuine feelings from those caused by an imbalance, but come to the conclusion that all feelings are chemical and what is considered imbalanced is determined by the subjective experience of the patient.

But talking about conditions such as depression in more mechanical terms is nonetheless useful and necessary. Ascribing a diagnosis to these varied and nebulous feelings dissociates the patient from the condition, allows the problem to be targeted and treated, and counteracts the tendency to blame the patient for what he or she cannot control.

So while by nature — or more likely, by way of our understanding—mental illness is different from other ailments, mental health professionals are right in talking about it as they would any other. It is especially important to do so when mental illness leads to suicide. Not only does talking about suicide and its causes raise public awareness, it is part of the grieving process — both personal and collective — that takes place when people die.

The suffering and distress of those who commit suicide is as real as any other. We live under the illusion that we have control of our thoughts and emotions, but these are as chemical as the level of insulin in the blood: diabetes is not a private matter that deserves respectful silence and neither should mental illness and suicide be. The silence surrounding suicide on Cornell’s campus does disservice both to those who commit suicide and to those who grieve. Those who are affected by a suicide should be able to talk about their grief and memories. Those who commit suicide deserve to be remembered and talked about, not effaced because of the tragic manner of their death.

Gabriel Arana is a graduate student in Linguistics. He can be contacted at garana@cornellsun.com. The Red Line appears alternate Thursdays.