The academic year 2013-14 changed the direction of Wendy Ingram’s life. Over the course of a few months, four members of the UC Berkeley department in which she was a graduate student died by suicide: an undergraduate student, a doctoral student, a post-doctoral fellow and a faculty member.
The tragic events left many in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology (MCB) reeling, but Ingram also found that the suicides prompted co-workers to share their own mental health issues. She discovered that, like herself, about half the people she talked to had sought therapy at some point...