A week before he died, Brian visited Josh Klontz, a close B-CC friend who attended Harvey Mudd College in nearby Claremont, Calif. Klontz later told the Gos that Brian revealed nothing about his inner turmoil that weekend.
“He was always eager to help tutor, mentor and love those around him, never expecting anything in return,” says Klontz, with whom Brian won three first-place prizes at the Montgomery County Science Fair. “What I regret most is not having the opportunity to return the favor in his time of need.”
But who even knew Brian was in need, if not his roommate, his family or his good friend from high school?
The Gos came to believe that top university administrators and counselors were aware of the severity of Brian’s emotional state and failed to inform them—either through negligence or a misapprehension of privacy laws. On May 17, 2010, a year after Brian’s death, the Gos brought a $20 million wrongful death suit against two deans and three therapists at Caltech.
College suicide is relatively rare—7.5 out of every 100,000 students, accounting for about half the suicides among all young people between 18 and 24, according to the American College Health Association. After accidents, it is the second most common cause of death on campus, however, and about a third of American colleges report at least one suicide every year.
According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, 90 percent of students who kill themselves have a psychiatric illness at the time of their death—most commonly depression, substance abuse, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. And mental illness appears to be on the rise on college campuses. The American Freshman National Norms 2011 survey reported that barely half of college freshmen self-rated their mental health as good or average, the fewest in 25 years.
Part of this uptick in reporting is due to decreased stigma, says Dr. Mary-Jeanne Raleigh, director of counseling services at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. “Students are more comfortable labeling their emotions,” she says, “either because they’ve had therapy prior to coming to campus, or they know it’s OK to ask for help.”
Such shifts in attitude, as well as advances in psychotropic medication, have enabled many more students with a diagnosed mental illness to successfully navigate college life. But for some, college is when adult symptoms of depression, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia first appear. It’s developmental—not college itself—Raleigh emphasizes. “That’s why you need really good diagnosticians at the college-age level,” she says.
When a psychological issue occurs in college students with no previous history, says Dr. Amita Jha, a psychiatrist who works with adolescents in Rockville, parents can be blindsided. It’s not unusual for a struggling young person to try to hide what’s happening, even if he or she has a good relationship with his or her parents.
“Students think they shouldn’t have to burden their parents,” Jha says. “It’s a great sense of failure, not feeling right.”
In Brian’s case, his suicide note was his only admission to his family that he felt himself unraveling. “I am wired wrong,” he wrote, “and do not belong in this world.”
“He was so clearly not in his right mind,” Margaret says. “And I kept thinking: If only he’d gone to see a counselor.”
A former social worker, Margaret sought to assuage her grief by reading everything she could about suicide and by looking back at her son’s life for clues she might have missed.
As a child, she says, Brian was talkative and inventive, staging elaborate theatrical productions with his younger siblings, and eager to engage adults on topics such as Egyptian hieroglyphics.
His polysyllabic vocabulary and grown-up interests made him a target of bullying in middle school, but he told his parents nothing of the taunts until eighth grade, when a group of boys surrounded him in the lunchroom at Westland Middle School and physically assaulted him. He was bruised and limped for several days afterward, his mother says.
Westland handled the situation well, according to Margaret, and the perpetrators were disciplined. However, she was unnerved by later retaliation, including a burning bag of dog feces left on their front step, and she pleaded with Delfin, a World Bank employee, to apply for a job overseas. Delfin, who had experienced discrimination while growing up ethnic Chinese in the Philippines, resisted, arguing that leaving town amounted to a victory for bullies.
Immediately after the incident, Brian was reluctant to return to school. Feeling at a loss to help her son cope, Margaret sent him to a therapist, whose diagnosis was “adjustment disorder,” defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as “marked distress in excess of what would be expected” in response to a stressful life event.
But after talking to the therapist, Margaret says, “Brian squared his shoulders and went back to school.” A journal entry he made during that period reads, “I have a small body, so I must develop my mind.”
At B-CC, Brian did just that, enrolling in the challenging International Baccalaureate program and bonding with friends who enjoyed the life of the mind as much as he did—kids who’d spend their lunch hour prepping for the Science Bowl against their crosstown rival, Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring.
With Brian as team captain, the students practiced against their teachers. Even when the teachers had the questions ahead of time, the students won, Straus recalls. “We couldn’t click fast enough.”
Reveling in an environment where it was cool to be smart, Brian played up geek-chic by adding rearview mirrors and a drinking tube to his taped-together glasses. But he was more than a brain. He was a debater, a fencer, an Ultimate Frisbee player, an Eagle Scout, a volunteer tutor. Every classmate and teacher interviewed says he had a lot of friends.
When he was accepted into Caltech, the Gos thought it was a good fit: academically intense but small (only 900 undergraduates) and friendly, with a lush Pacific Rim setting and many other students of Asian heritage.
“I remember how excited he was for Caltech,” recalls Laura Swartz, who attended B-CC’s Sadie Hawkins dance senior year with Brian. “He had his bright orange cleats [Caltech’s color] for Ultimate Frisbee, an orange disc—he couldn’t hold in his excitement.”
After Brian enrolled as a freshman in the fall of 2006, reality appeared to live up to expectation. “He always seemed so happy,” Margaret says. As for the things he didn’t like, Brian threw himself into changing them, convincing the ombudsman to make a difficult freshman class pass-fail, for instance.
He worked hard—pulling all-nighters to finish problems everyone else had given up on—but he’d also skip a day of research to go to the beach, friends and faculty recalled at Caltech’s memorial service on May 26, 2009.
They spoke that day of his dazzling intelligence, his generosity and humor. They talked about how he decided to learn drums and taught himself to play a creditable cover of the band Blink 182’s “What’s My Age Again?” by watching YouTube videos. And about how, at the end of sophomore year, he resolved to move beyond his geeky pajama-bottoms-and-glasses look, and got contact lenses, a new haircut and started working out. And about how he became president of the “work-hard-play-hard” Page House by popular acclaim.
Margaret had flown out to attend the service reluctantly, aware that campus memorials can trigger copycat suicides. “But my husband wanted to preserve Brian’s memory and wanted to be magnanimous, and he asked me strongly to go,” she says.
While she was there, the mother of a close female friend of Brian’s told her several times that “[Caltech] should have done more to help him.”
Margaret found the remark puzzling. “But this was before we knew he had attempted [suicide],” she says, “and Caltech hadn’t told us.”
