DAVIS, CALIF. — As 20-year-old Jennifer Tse was dying in January, she typed a message on her laptop to the coroner's investigators she expected would examine her body. The lonely UC Davis sophomore, depressed and struggling with her studies, had swallowed cold pills, antidepressants, dishwashing liquid and insect poison.
"It's kind of rather sad, it's no way out," she wrote as she described her blurred vision, shaking muscles and a sense that her head was detached from her body. "Hopefully my IQ will stay at the same level. If I end up dead, then oh well."
For five days, no one seemed to notice her absence until her roommate realized something was amiss, used a screwdriver to open the locked door to Tse's room and found her body on the floor.
Tse's death is another grim statistic in what university administrators say is an escalating mental health crisis on campuses across the nation.
She was one of at least nine students who committed suicide at UC Davis during the last three academic years. Her death came four months after a high-level UC committee concluded that the university's overtaxed mental health services fell "significantly short" and that the 10-campus system must urgently expand its counseling programs.
"We have had an increasing number of students with serious mental health problems while services are lacking," said UC Santa Barbara Vice Chancellor Michael Young, co-chairman of the Student Mental Health Committee. "We just don't have the appropriate level of support to have healthy campuses."
The increase in mental health problems at UC is part of a national trend arising from the growing stress of university life and the growing number of students who arrive at college already under treatment for mental illness, university psychologists and officials say.
Advances in drug treatment mean that many students with psychological disorders who could not have coped with campus life a generation ago now go on to college.
The number of students seeking counseling at the eight main undergraduate campuses (not including UC San Francisco and the new UC Merced) rose 23% during 2000-01 to 2004-05 from 12,384 students to 15,285 students.
At UC, a quarter of the students who seek counseling are already on psychotropic medication. Many are being treated for depression and anxiety, some for bipolar disorder.
