E-mail message to UW-Green Bay Students
October 8, 2007

REMARKS AND ESSAYS

All UWGB Students:

As UWGB’s chancellor, I am here to serve you.  And, in that spirit, I want to add some personal thoughts to a message you recently received from Director of Counseling Services Greg Smith on how to participate, under Lt Governor Lawton's leadership, in National Depression Screening Day.

Since Virginia Tech, universities across the country have ever more intensely been attending to campus safety.   Same at UWGB.   I am even co-chairing the Governor’s Taskforce on Campus Safety. 

But, at UWGB we have long worried about another kind of  violence on our campus.  Violence that results in fatalities.  It is the violence that distressed students do to themselves.

Depression is the killer.  It’s generally a very effectively treatable ailment.  If only we recognize it.  And then act to get help.

But, because we avoid talking about depression, it remains an epidemic killer, particularly among our younger people.  It is our uneasiness in talking about the subject that makes depression the deadly ailment that it can be. 

I took a vow to never again be uncomfortable talking about suicide.  Why?  A couple of very personal reasons.

First, as chancellor and every year, I must call and talk with grieving parents who have just lost their son or daughter, a UWGB student.  We talk together, we cry together.

My tears flow because I remember.  I remember the night I got a call from another university.   My son, academically excelling and popular, had killed himself.  That’s when I promised to never again avoid the subject of depression or to feel ashamed to talk about suicide.

So, as uncomfortable as my message may make you initially feel, please join in that vow.  Don’t feel uncomfortable for if we allow the stigma to continue then people for whom help is readily available are less likely to obtain life-saving assistance.

And, that’s my final point, one I learned from that Governor’s Taskforce.  Campus safety is all of our responsibility.  We must look out for each other, create a safe culture including a culture that safely allows distressed individuals to obtain help. 

We can, with all of our commitment, be ever more a campus where we care for each other because we care about each other.

My best,
Bruce

      Faculty/Staff   |   Students

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