I get touchy on the subject of suicide. I've known too many people who have been devastated by the suicide of a parent/child/spouse. It's a grief people never fully recover from. Sadly the narrative making Hilinski a martyr with a national PR campaign has encouraged other students at WSU to follow his example. There have been other students at WSU who left in their notes how they knew no one would make as big a deal of their death as they did with Tyler's. They are now dead and the thesis proved correct.
I know another D1 University which had a football player commit suicide within the past year. The team kept it quiet and I'm pretty sure it never hit the paper. To my knowledge there wasn't a clustering of suicides on this schools campus as a result.
I realize there is going to be a lot of disagreement on this topic and I don't have a popular opinion on how to deal with it. I hope we can agree suicide is a really bad thing and should be discouraged for the sake of the rest of the community.
I don't think mental illness is the main contributing factor to suicide in Tyler's case. If you look at suicide statistics, it's clear something else is going on with Americans that can't be explained by stage one CTE.
https://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/ Why so many 15-24 year olds, disproportionately upper middle class, white, and male are killing themselves is a discussion worth having. Why there has have been a dramatic increase in the past decade is also worth investigating.
Back to Bryce Beekman. I hope the school dedicates the season to Beekman. Arranging a missing man formation on the first play of the game on defense in our home opener is also appropriate.