In general, the prevailing feeling about college years is that they are the best times in life. But given statistics indicating that suicide is the second-leading cause of death for college-aged people, there is a strong movement among advocates in the mental-health world who are determined to make that optimistic adage more of a reality.

Jan Ulrich and Donna Satow each has lost a son to suicide and both are fighting through the sorrow so that other families can avoid similar pain.

Ulrich has participated in several suicide prevention groups since her son, Nathan Eisert, took his own life in June 2002. She currently chairs the awareness committee of the Kentucky Suicide Prevention Planning Group.

Satow, along with her husband Phillip, are the co-founders of the Jed Foundation, which is named after their son, who committed suicide at age 20 in 1998.

Being forced to deal with this issue has spurred each family to increase awareness of the subject by educating students, coaches, athletics administrators, institution presidents, athletic trainers and professors about signs that can help curtail the suicide rate in young people.

One of the first steps is to be aware when depression is setting in with an individual.

Ulrich's son committed suicide after being dismissed from the basketball team at Western Kentucky University. Since all of Eisert's close contacts were uninformed about depression and suicide, no one could foresee what was happening.

"We now know warning signs of a student-athlete in crisis,'' Ulrich said. "You could go down the checklist and say, yeah, he had this and this. At the time we had no idea and neither did the coaches or trainers.''

Eisert earned a basketball scholarship after being a freshman walk-on at Western Kentucky. The very day he was informed that his college education would be funded, he badly re-injured an ankle, which he had broken a couple of years before.

He was told it would be a full year before he could recover, which had a downward spiraling effect. He apologized to his parents for not being able to play in games.

After being an honor roll student his freshman year, Eisert missed classes and was eventually released from the basketball team.

"Suicide is really a journey,'' Ulrich said. "That journey may begin with depression and maybe there is a loss of some kind, like a girlfriend, an injury or something else. This layer of losses on top of depression may move someone closer (to suicide). Then somewhere along the line a person may get to the point of saying, 'OK, I'm having trouble seeing my way out of this.' It's like blinders go on and they can't see that there are people around them who can love them and care for them.''

Ulrich said if the warning signs of suicide are there, the best approach to take is to confront it with the person.

"That's essentially sitting down and asking someone, 'Are you thinking about killing yourself?' '' she said. "You ask it that bluntly. It may be according to who you're talking to, but a lot of times that question will be enough of a shock to the person on the other side, because no one has asked them that question before. Everybody has danced around it. Getting it out in the open, you're now saying, 'I'm OK talking about this.' You can't say, 'Well, you're not thinking of hurting yourself are you?' That says to the person, 'Don't tell me, I don't want to know.' So it does get down to being very straightforward.''

Educational lifeline

The Satows' foundation is available to more than 3.5 million students on about 420 campuses across the nation. The Jed Foundation is a place where research is being conducted to help stem the tide of suicides.

"One audience we can reach is the students, one audience is the college administrators and coaches, and the other audience is the parents.'' Satow said. "For the students, we run a program called Ulifeline.org. We're just now coming to the midpoint of completing the second generation of Ulifeline. It's a program that has taken and carefully analyzed the best things in mental health. So we have a lot of good, solid information on the program, and it is college-specific. You log in at your college and you can link directly to your counseling service.''

Ulifeline was the creation of Ron Gibori, who was a close friend of Jed Satow at the University of Arizona. Gibori, the director of Ulifeline, also lost another close friend to suicide six months after Jed took his own life.

"I worked with the president of my university as well as the counseling director there, and we created the first Ulifeline,'' Gibori said. "We had tremendous success once we launched it. The university counseling center went from having 158 students accessing its Web site per month to an average of more than 3,000.''

A primary message resulting from these efforts is that student-athletes are not immune to depression. These men and women have unique external stressors that can make them vulnerable to a mental-health issue.

This is not to construe that student-athletes are more important than the rest of the student body, but to say there are some issues in their college experience that are different.

"For example, an 18- or 19-year-old kid who is struggling with self-esteem issues and he makes a mistake in front of 80,000 people, and it is written about in the papers or he receives phone calls at his apartment or hears about it on talk radio, those are external factors and stressors that the person doesn't have control over,'' said Chris Carr, a clinical sports psychologist for the Methodist Sports Medicine Center in Indianapolis. "It makes it very unique to their role as an athlete. To assume that it won't impact them in any significant way is a false assumption.''

Since 1992, Carr has worked daily with athletes at Washington State University (1992-94), Arizona State University (1994-95), Ohio State University (1995-2000), and Purdue University (2001-present).

Carr says student-athletes, particularly those in Division I revenue-producing sports, don't have a normal college experience. During his days at Ohio State, he recalls counseling football players, who were asked at times for autographs by fellow students.

"They are being encouraged to be in the classroom to study and yet what awaited them were external demands,'' Carr said. "But if they don't go to class to avoid that stress, they are being seen as noncompliant and not interested in pursuing academics. The reality is they are there to get an education and they have to deal with those stressors that are unique to their environment. But how are they going to learn that? That's where psychological counseling and education can be helpful for these kids.''

In the 12 years he's counseled student-athletes, Carr believes the stigma of admitting they need mental counseling is slowly eroding. He wants this to become as commonly thought of as dealing with a physical ailment.

That's why he's spearheading a movement to have a group of 20 to 25 clinical sports psychologists, who counsel student-athletes, to meet during a seminar at the NCAA national offices to discuss their occupations. He hopes this evolves into an annual meeting so the care and prevention in this area will increase.

"I don't think there is a Division I athletics director who can honestly say that none of his or her 400 or so athletes have mental-health issues,'' Carr said. "I use this kind of analogy. Many years ago, coaches wrapped ankles. Many years ago if an athlete had a physical ailment they were sent to the student health center. Nowadays we have sports-medicine staffs, because they've acknowledged over the years that this is a group of individuals who have unique medical-care needs.''