NEW YORK
A depressed Hunter College student who swallowed handfuls of Tylenol, then saved her own life by calling 911, was in for a surprise when she returned to her dorm room after the ordeal.
The lock had been changed on the door. She was being expelled from the residence, the school informed her, because she violated her housing contract by attempting suicide. The 19-year-old was allowed to retrieve her belongings in the presence of a security guard.
Policies barring potentially suicidal students from campus dorms have popped up across the country in recent years as colleges have struggled to decide how to best curb an estimated 1,100 suicides a year.
But just as quickly, some of those rules have come under attack. Hunter College announced last week that it was abandoning its three-year-old suicide policy as part of a legal settlement with the student, who sued claiming her 2004 ouster from the dorms violated federal law protecting disabled people from discrimination.
The school, part of the City University of New York system, also agreed to pay her $65,000. Hunter spokeswoman Meredith Halpern says the college may still consider temporary removal from residence halls as a future option for troubled students, but such evictions will no longer be automatic.
Karen Bower, a senior attorney with the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, which helped litigate the case, says she hoped the settlement would prompt other schools to rethink their policies.
“The real danger of these policies is that they discourage students from getting the help that they really need,” Bower says, adding that young students might be scared away from speaking out about suicidal thoughts if they believed it would mean an abrupt eviction.
Similar lawsuits are already in the works.George Washington University is being sued by a former student who was barred from campus and threatened with expulsion after checking himself in to a hospital for depression. The student, Jordan Nott, says he never tried to kill himself, but had been thinking about it because of the suicide death of a close friend, also a George Washington student.
