And U.S. Olympic cyclist Kelly Catlin died by suicide last Thursday at the age of 23. Catlin, who won a silver medal with her cycling team at the 2016 Olympic Games, was a graduate student in computational and mathematical engineering at Stanford and died in her residence on the university’s campus. Catlin was one of a set of triplets. In addition to cycling, she was an accomplished violinist. Her family reports that she seemed to change after two accidents at the end of last year, one of which resulted in a concussion. Speaking to The Washington Post, her father said, “She was not the Kelly that we knew. She spoke like a robot. … [S]omehow her thinking was changed and she couldn’t see beyond, I guess, her depression. After her concussion, she started embracing nihilism.” Her family says she first attempted suicide in January and that the family narrowly stopped her death by calling the police after receiving an alarming email. In a post for the website VeloNews last month, Kelly Catlin wrote, “[M]ost of the time, I don’t make everything work. It’s like juggling with knives, but I really am dropping a lot of them. It’s just that most of them hit the floor and not me.”
Last month, another Stanford graduate student, 26-year-old Ziwen “Jerry” Wang died by suicide. Wang was a fifth year Ph.D. student in materials science and engineering.
You can reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.