“Probably he was too smart and too elegant to survive in this world.”

—Mayumi Tonegawa, speaking of her son, Satto Tonegawa, an MIT freshman who killed himself on October 27th.

I got the quote from a Globe article headlined, “MIT Reexamines Campus Efforts after Two Sucides.” The piece looks at how the campus is evaluating mental health efforts and general quality of life issues in the wake of the deaths of Tonegawa and Nicolas Del Castillo, a freshman who hung himself three days before classes started in September.

Last week, in response to the suicides, [chancellor Eric] Grimson launched a task force to examine all aspects of student life, from mental health services to living arrangements.

My heart goes out to the parents and families of these young men—what a tragedy. But it strikes me as problematic at best to put this one on the culture at MIT. Was there really something about MIT that caused an 18-year-old to despair after perhaps a week of being there? Or a few months?

I wonder, for example, if there isn’t a hint somewhere in here about what might have gone wrong for Satto Tonegawa…. Or maybe not; we’ll never know. But it seems facile to say, Because this happened here, here caused it.

I went to college at a time when there was far less pressure on students than there is today. Though most of us excelled at something, we weren’t expected to excel at everything. There was still a conviction that it was good to be “well-rounded”—basically, balanced—and to some extent being well-rounded meant that you couldn’t be good at everything. Some things you did just because you enjoyed them, not because they got you somewhere.

I wonder if this is true for students applying to Yale and Harvard and MIT today, or if really their lives are so targeted that everything is directed toward getting in, getting in, getting in, so that if something goes wrong once one arrives at the college one has devoted one’s childhood to attending, a delicate balance is disrupted….