Last week, a Yale freshman named Zach Brunt killed himself in a physics lab on campus. The next day, a candlelight vigil was held in front of his residence. Yale’s Dean of Students sent a campus-wide email addressing the death within 24 hours, and alerted students to available mental health resources.

Last Saturday, a Harvard senior named Wendy Chang hanged herself in her room. That same day, a vigil was held inside her residence. That same day, the Dean of Harvard College sent a campus-wide email alerting students to the tragedy.

A month ago, Stanford sophomore Samantha Wopat killed herself in her campus residence. The silence from Stanford was deafening.

I recognize that suicide is a difficult thing to discuss, especially on a college campus. It affects us all in different ways, and privacy restrictions at times restrain University action.

However, nothing can excuse a weeklong silence about a student’s death, broken only by a short op-ed in our pages. Additionally, no administrator has addressed campus about suicide. The University’s failure to foster a campus dialogue about mental health or mental illness is appalling.

Should we not speak openly about suicide and mental illness? Is acknowledging your students aren’t always healthy a bad thing? Does Stanford truly believe that an event like this, which impacts so many students on so many levels, shouldn’t be addressed directly and honestly?

What Harvard and Yale appear to recognize – and what for some reason Stanford seems incapable of realizing – is that students will talk about suicide. Stanford’s job is to make that conversation safe, open and informed by campus resources and mental health professionals. Their job is to make sure we know that they are there for us if we need them. Following a suicide of a fellow student, we needed them. They weren’t there.

At Yale’s campus vigil, the head of Zach’s residence hall told students that Zach’s death should remind them, “We don’t live in a perfect world.” That’s an important message. Those are the words of a leader who wants his students to know it is normal to struggle and feel overwhelmed in the face of immeasurable tragedy, even if they happen to also attend a “dream school.”

I fear Stanford’s unwillingness or inability to convey a similar message will only contribute to the silence that too often surrounds mental health problems and mental illness on this campus. Why did it take them a week to reach out to us? Why was there no meaningful, campus-wide response? Why did our peer institutions handle this in such a drastically different way?

Tragedies such as these often raise hard, unanswerable questions. The lack of university response shouldn’t raise more. I know Stanford works hard to make this an exceptional university to attend. But sometimes, acknowledging this is not a perfect world can be an important step toward improving it.

Brendan O’Byrne ’14

Deputy Editor, The Stanford Daily