Hindsight is 20/20 yes. However, I had a student who declared himself to be suicidal, and I phoned the counseling center while he was in my office. I said I had a young man who needed to talk with someone, and could someone see him right away.

The woman who answered the phone picked up right away that this was an immediate need and said, of course, there would be someone available to talk with him. Obviously, instructors are not phoning on a daily basis asking for help for a student, so the request was taken seriously.

I then said, in a casual way, that I would walk him over to make sure he found it. He was very silent, and even though I am not a gabber, I would make little comments about this and that to make sure he didn't slip away or change his mind. Tthere was no way I was picking up the newspaper the next day to read that he'd never gone to the counseling center and killed himself. He was from another culture, and I wasn't sure how resistant the culture might be to counseling, whether he was thinking clearly enough to follow through, so I made sure he got there.

At the end of the semester, he had pulled his grades up from D to B. He thanked me for sending him to the center, said that he'd been taught how to take written tests by his counselor because tests were oral in the schools from which he'd come, and he'd gotten over the break-up with his girlfriend. His counselor, by the way, was the director of the center, not any of the graduate student psychology counselors who help staff the center.

On another occasion, just last year, a student's uncle was kidnapped in a S.A. country. My A student suddenly was a mess who couldn't think straight or meet deadlines. Now, she was not self-destructive, but I did not know where the crisis counseling was on this campus, as I was a new arrival myself. So I said, "Let's find out together." I took her first to the office of an administrator I knew well to ask for directions. I then escorted her to the crisis counseling.

Students' respond so positively to these small acts of concern, it is almost embarrassing.

I don't see why it would have been so hard for any of the instructors who obviously saw trouble to have taken similar actions to find help for this young man. It does not have to be done as an order, "Get help or get off our campus." It can be expressed as a desire to help, which in my case, it simply was.