THE DAILY ILLINI
MONDAY December 11, 2017
The independent student newspaper at the University of Illinois since 1871
A quiet crisis
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Vol. 147 Issue 29
LONGFORM
Illinois loses weekend matchup to UNLV
A conversation on mental health, suicide on campus
BY CHARLOTTE COLLINS VIDEO EDITOR
Everything seemed to be in place for her collegiate career. She graduated from the prestigious Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Aurora, Illinois, and was recently admitted to the University as a chemical engineer. But, everything wasn’t just falling perfectly into place; rather, everything was going exactly as Dayna Lei had planned. Quickly finding her footing in college was never a concern; she had always been a good student. Even better, she was gifted. Two years into her degree, she put a stop to her studies at the end of the Spring 2017 semester. Lei was suicidal.
Smith, Frazier play well, but team falls short of victory in Las Vegas BY WILL GERARD STAFF WRITER
University of Nevada, Las Vegas went on a 14-6 run over 2:23 minutes late in the contest after a Mark Smith 3-pointer cut the Rebel lead to two points with a little over three minutes remaining. UNLV (8-2) pulled away late for an 89-82 victory over Illinois (7-4, Big Ten 0-2). Smith led the Illini with 17 points, and he shot 4 out of 5 from 3-point range. Smith was 4 for 28 from 3-point range in the previous 10 games. Rebel freshman Brandon McCoy scored 22 points (9-11 FG) and brought down 10 rebounds. He started the game with two dunks early in the contest, and the Rebels took a 14-4 lead after hitting their first six shots from the field. Freshman Trent Frazier ignited the Illini off the bench with 16 points (6-11 FG, 2-3 3 FG) and a team-high four steals.
Mounting pressure
The pressure to overachieve was a weight that never let up. Lei’s troubles compounded each week as assignment grades became final grades. And it didn’t let up as she became a sophomore, when final grades became a GPA. There was Lei’s demanding workload, plus the lifestyle changes that came with being a chemical engineering major. Add on relationship struggles, and Lei’s stress was overloaded. By fall of her sophomore year, Lei felt like she was losing her grip on her schoolwork and academic reputation, which had always been her identity. She started having suicidal thoughts during winter break in 2016. The thoughts would creep their way into her mind, coming and passing, but never ceasing completely. Even when things started to look up, the thoughts were latent and waiting to resurface. It wasn’t the first time Lei had struggled with depression or suicidal ideation. At 14, she ran away from her suburban home and left a suicide note. Instead of bringing an acute awareness to the importance of her mental health, the outcome that followed was the opposite: She swallowed her feelings, ignored the ideation, picked up the same emotional weight and pretended it wasn’t heavy. “I was in an inpatient psychiatric ward for about a week and then an outpatient one for three weeks,” Lei said. “In the years afterward, I kind of led myself to believe that mental health didn’t exist.” Now, as a University student, she was experiencing the infamous engineering student lifestyle that glorifies grades over all else. Lei was neglecting her health and happiness, and the effects were surfacing. Lei recalls her peers reveling in pulling all-nighters, proclaiming their disrupted sleep schedules and boasting about their overloaded schedules. “They had the idea that not taking care of yourself
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Dayna Lei put her studies on hold to focus on her mental health.
somehow makes you a better student,” Lei said. “They care more about being a better student, or pretending to be a better student, than their actual health.” The heavy workload and overachieving culture she experienced as a chemical engineer was nothing new; her schoolwork had been comparable to college level since her sophomore year of high school, her first year at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy. All throughout her time there, she and her peers stayed awake long nights doing homework. It was seen as
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normal. Abnormal, she felt, was any serious discourse on the mental health effects of this cultural and academic pressure. Lei remembers a brief and particularly revealing conversation with a high school friend. “I asked him, ‘If I was selfharming, would you report me to the counseling office?’’’ Lei said. “He was like, ‘Yeah, because evolutionarily, it’s not normal to want to hurt yourself.’” In order to blend in, Lei kept her head down and continued to push the troubling thoughts to the periph-
ery, focusing on her academics. She made good grades and achieved her goals. But it only ever granted temporary relief; there was always something new to tackle. As a college student, she found greater competition in Champaign. Lei was under the impression that college would be a breeze compared to the long days of lecture and sleepless nights studying at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy. “They were like, ‘Oh, you’re going to be surrounded by normal people now who went to normal high schools. It’s going to be so easy for you,’”
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Lei said. But it wasn’t easy for her at all. The standard of achievement as a chemical engineer made Lei feel small and stay quiet. Whenever she wanted to ask questions in class, her heart rate spiked as if she were sprinting. She attributes some of that anxiety to “smart people culture: You’re not allowed to ask questions because you’re supposed to know.” Even her non-major classes seemed to require more energy than she could give. Some of her instructors granted
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