UPDATE: The ASU State Press has an update on the suicide incident this  morning here.

This sad, breaking news from the ASU student newspaper: A graduate student committed suicide at 11:40 a.m. in the College of Design South building. The State Press is reporting via Twitter and their Website that the building is on lockdown after the student shot himself inside a professors office. Heartbreaking. Keep tuned to the State Press for further developments, but, in the meantime, think about this:

National Public Radio has been running a series of broadcasts on the increase in mental distress among today’s college students. You can view today’s broadcast here. You’ll hear how more and more of our college students are depressed, stressed and not dealing with life very well. Part of it is they seem to think they have to be perfect – not really surprising considering they are products of the most-involved (some say overinvolved) parental generation of all times.

So, if you know a college student, talk to them – and listen. These kids need to feel like they are not alone. Case in point: Yesterday, at church, I met a new kid, freshman from out of town. I talked to her about her classes, etc., and at some point I said if she got lonely, she could come over to our house for a meal. I was surprised to see her face light up so instantly (my cooking isn’t that good!) and even more surprised when she said, “They just think we can do this on our own, you know? Everyone thinks we’re ok, but sometimes we just need advice on how to handle all these changes.”

The words just blurted out of her mouth, it was like she’d just been waiting for someone – anyone – to notice that she was 18, in a new city, adjusting to hard classes and major demands and more freedom than she knew what to do with and peer pressure and professor pressure and God knows what else. It hurt to watch.

They aren’t as OK as we think they are, these young people crowding our supermarkets and our roads. We need to pay attention to that.

Cute pigs who CANNOT give you the Swine Flu

They aren’t really broadcasting this at UA, but according to my UA-student daughter, a number of people are out sick with the flu in Wildcat town, some of them with H1NI.

Clare, who began running a high fever last night and started feeling sick “all over,” called UA Campus Health Services this a.m. to get an appointment so she could get a doctors note that would allow her to miss classes (some professors require this). She was told she couldn’t come in because Health Services is trying to reduce the number of people exposed to the flu. This is probably part of UA’s pandemic plan some of which is based on the CDC’s recommendations for universities in dealing with H1N1.

A nurse administered a health survey to Clare over the phone and pronounced her sick with the flu, then gave her a lecture about how “contagious and viscous this strain is” without saying it was swine flu. She prescribed some medicine to reduce the symptoms, especially the massive headache, then explained how Campus Health Services sent off samples (of body fluids, I’m guessing) from people early in the semester who came in sick and “they tested positive for H1N1.”

Students are supposed to stay away from classes until they are free of fever for 24 hours without the use of Tylenol, which, Clare said the nurse said, could be anywhere from three to seven days from the onset of symptoms. I’m wondering if the overall GPA of the UA will be down considerably this semester from students not being able to keep up with work when they are missing so many days of school. Clare says she’ll be able to keep up with things by viewing class lectures online – once her head stops pounding.

Backtracking to try to figure out where Clare may have picked up the germ is difficult: it could have been anywhere in town. But she said someone in her French class was coughing last week, as was someone in the choir she sings with. Upwards of 30 people were exposed by those two people when Clare was exposed – not counting all the other people they exposed in their other classes at UA. Clare started feeling sick yesterday, in the Dallas airport, so she exposed everyone on the plane as she flew back to Tucson, although she said she tried to hold her breath as much as possible for the whole flight. Of course, she has two roommates who will be exposed, and they will continue to go to classes until they feel sick, by which time they may have exposed more people. And thus the flu virus – H1N1 or the “regular” – travels on.

An armed robber in Indianapolis shopping center ended up hugging the woman he was trying to rob and then praying with her before leaving with only $20 and the woman’s cell phone. A brief story on the event can be found here, and it is all over the news this a.m. All I wanted to add was that people frequently question the power of prayer because their understanding of God is so limited. They view God as a magician and prayer as the way you can get God to do your bidding.

But what anyone who has spent any length of time on their knees will tell you is that prayer doesn’t necessarily change events; it changes the person praying. And in that personal change, events can – as happened during the robbery – take a turn for the better. If you watch this video, it is obvious that prayer has some power. It just isn’t the power televangelists proclaim.