CAMBRIDGE - Satto Tonegawa was a bright teenager with a flair for piano and cello. Two months ago he started his freshman year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his father is a Nobel-winning neuroscientist. He had chosen to live in a single room in an unremarkable 18-story brick dormitory off Memorial Drive.
That was where he died, asphyxiating himself with a bag full of helium. His body was found Oct. 25, five days shy of his 19th birthday.
“He was funny and cool and beyond-belief smart. We never saw him struggle even once. Probably he was too smart and too elegant to survive in this world,’’ said his mother, Mayumi Tonegawa, who added that her son returned often to the family home in Newton and seemed happy at college. “It feels like he might have just slipped into the seventh dimension, and he’ll come back someday and tell us about his journey.’’
Nicolas Del Castillo was also a talented pianist who lived in a single at MIT. He had loved math since childhood and probably would have majored in it had he finished his sophomore year. Three days before classes began in September, he closed the door of his dorm room and hanged himself. He had just turned 18.
All suicides are tragedies. But at MIT, where five undergraduates killed themselves between 1998 and 2001, the issue is especially fraught - and the tight-knit community is struggling to understand why it has suddenly lost two young students in two months.
“We’re in pain. We’re reeling from the shock,’’ chancellor Eric Grimson said. “I don’t think we’re ever emotionally prepared to deal with something like this.’’
Last week, in response to the suicides, Grimson launched a task force to examine all aspects of student life, from mental health services to living arrangements. The school already offers some of the nation’s most comprehensive counseling programs, which are used by more than a third of students - comparable to statistics at other elite schools such as Harvard, where 40 percent of students see counselors. MIT’s suicide rate is not significantly higher than its peers’.
Mental health professionals say no school can fully prevent suicide among students making the delicate transition into adulthood at a time when many major mental illnesses can first appear.
Yet the wrenching details and timing of the two recent deaths have given MIT special cause to reflect, Grimson said.
The recent victims’ youth is striking, compared with the 10 suicide victims at MIT from 2001 to 2009. Six were graduate students or postdoctoral researchers, and none were in their teens.