On June 10, 2009, Jackson Wang, a Caltech senior, committed suicide two days before he would have received his diploma. In July, Long Phan, a graduate student there, also took his own life. Both young men killed themselves the same way Brian had. (Because of the copycat phenomenon, experts say that suicide methods should not be reported in the media.)
The question that continued to haunt the Gos was why their articulate and extroverted son had not reached out for help. Concerned about the impact Brian’s death might have on his two closest college friends, Margaret kept in touch with them by email. One, Mason Smith, had a summer internship in New Jersey that year, and she invited him to spend the Fourth of July weekend in Bethesda.
During the visit, Smith mentioned that 12 days before his death, Brian had gone to the roof of a Caltech building intending to jump headfirst. But he lost his nerve and called Smith. Trained in peer suicide prevention, Smith talked to Brian for an hour and a half, and eventually persuaded him to come down.
Smith referred to this incident while in the car with Delfin, who “almost drove off the road,” Margaret says. Smith told the Gos that he urged Brian to seek help from the Caltech counseling center, but that he himself hadn’t reported the incident.
“After talking him down, I don’t think that I would’ve said he was suicidal had I been asked,” Smith says now. “At the time, I would’ve said that he had just hit a low point, that it was out of his system, and that it could only go up from there.”
Horrified, Margaret contacted Brian’s close female friend and learned that on the night of April 25, after his girlfriend broke up with him, Brian had gotten drunk and threatened to stab himself.
Margaret also learned that he had spoken to the girl about suicide on subsequent occasions, and sworn her to secrecy. But the girl told her mother, who became so concerned about the toll this burden was taking on her daughter that she called Caltech’s counseling center several times, asking them to help Brian.
“We are helping him,” the friend’s mother was told.
Margaret then obtained Brian’s records from the counseling center and learned for the first time that he had been seeing a therapist periodically since his freshman year. On the morning after threatening to stab himself, he’d emailed the therapist: “This year I met someone truly amazing. …She broke up with me today. I am very heartbroken and am beside myself with grief. This is coming at a very difficult time in my academic and extracurricular life, as well, and I am just struggling to find the will to go on.”
Brian made an appointment with his therapist, who noted that his mood was “dysthymic,” or mildly depressed. He began writing suicide notes that were later found on his computer, and went to a dorm roof intending to jump. After Smith talked him down, Brian emailed one of the deans, who sent him to the counseling center for a crisis evaluation. The counselor on call (not his regular therapist) noted that Brian described his climb to the rooftop along with his plan of jumping off. “Client was very articulate. …He stated that he is not feeling suicidal today and is not even having those thoughts.”
The counselor’s notes report that they discussed a plan of action should his suicidal thoughts return, such as reaching out to a friend or recontacting the counseling center.
That their suicidal son was allowed to return to the dorm with nothing more than a “plan of action” was the last straw for the Gos. “A young man who goes up on the roof and says he wants to jump off headfirst needs immediate medical attention,” Margaret says. She cites an incident later that summer when a woman attempted to jump off an L.A. freeway overpass. “The police didn’t ask her if she wanted to go to the hospital—they took her.”
That summer, the Gos decided to sue Caltech and began searching for a California lawyer, although it wasn’t until March 2010 that the Heimberg Law Group in L.A. accepted their case on a contingency basis. Concerned that the suit would not be filed before the one-year statute of limitations expired, Margaret also filed a complaint with the California Board of Psychology against the two therapists who had seen Brian, as well as the head of Caltech’s counseling center in February 2010.
Suing Caltech meant antagonizing the place Brian had deeply loved. Some of Brian’s friends tried to dissuade the Gos; others stopped speaking to them.
“A lot of people are asking why we’re blaming the school,” Margaret says. “I believe to this day that Brian’s death was preventable, and I cannot conceive why the many people who knew [he was suicidal] didn’t call us. …We hope the lawsuit will change the way the college deals with mental illness in the future.”
At many colleges around the country, changes already are occurring in the way cases like Brian’s are handled. The 1974 Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which made 18-year-olds custodians of their educational records, is cited by colleges as the reason they don’t involve parents when mental health issues emerge on campus. But FERPA allows the release of information when a student’s health and safety are at risk.
Following the 2007 shooting rampage at Virginia Tech, where a mentally ill student killed 32 people before committing suicide, the U.S. Department of Education issued new guidelines affirming that colleges may contact the parents of emotionally troubled students. Virginia law now requires state universities to do so, but most states—including California—do not.
Raleigh, who is past president of the American College Counseling Association, says she doesn’t believe in mandating parental notification. However, when students have a psychological crisis at St. Mary’s, she says, “90 percent of the time, we involve the parents and it’s great.”
Given that policies regarding parental notification vary wildly from college to college, most parents remain unaware of how their child’s school would handle a mental health crisis until one occurs. Jha believes that even if the laws aren’t changed, parents need to lobby universities for a standardized system of notification when a student is in danger. College students, she says, are “in a semi-independent state where courts are giving them full freedom as full adults, yet their brains are not fully adult; neither are their situations fully adult. They’re at school—they have no experience of the world.”
In April 2011, Margaret received a sympathetic phone call from an investigator at the California Board of Psychology. He told her that although he personally found Caltech’s actions regarding Brian “morally repugnant,” the psychiatrists assigned to the case had “scoured California law” and could find no reason to indict the school.
That September, a California judge dismissed the Gos’ suit in summary judgment, stating that Caltech had “no duty of care” toward its adult students.
Although Caltech did not respond to numerous requests for comment, there are signs that changes have occurred there since Brian’s death. In 2011, a Caltech mental health task force recommended hiring more staff and instituting late-night “student hours” for counseling services, adding more residence advisers, and increasing outreach to parents. In 2012, a chapter of Active Minds, a student-run mental health organization, was established on campus.
Margaret says that the news of Active Minds at Caltech brought “tears of joy.”
The Gos are appealing the dismissal of their lawsuit. If the case goes to trial, Margaret says, more parents will know about it, “and that wouldn’t be a bad thing.”
Margaret believes that colleges’ policy of treating students as adults must take into account that the students are still their parents’ children: “I didn’t care to know what grades Brian got, and I never once contacted a professor about an issue he was having,” she says. “But I did care to know that he wanted to die and acted on that wish enough to climb up to the roof of one of their buildings. If they had called me, I would not have sued.
“Ninety to 95 percent of people who attempt suicide go on to lead normal lives. Is it too much to ask to allow me to try to save my child’s life?”
Kathleen Wheaton is a frequent contributor to the magazine and lives in Bethesda.
