Anna Sorkomova's body was found at the end of January, hanging in a wooded area a short distance northeast of the main parking lot at UNBC.
The Russian exchange student had been missing for six weeks.
Sorkomova, 23, had been due to make a court appearance two days after she was last seen. She had been charged with theft under $5,000 for minor shoplifting. As a result, she had been taken to the local Immigration Canada office and her passport had been seized.
"Her fear, shame and precipitating sense of hopelessness may have been contributing factors in her decision to take her own life," wrote coroner Beth Larcombe in a 20-page report after an inquest was held into Sorkomova's death.
Larcombe recommended that UNBC improve its contact with its international and hire more counselling staff. By the time the report came out, UNBC had already hired a full-time counsellor, to go with the part-time counsellor that had been working when Sorkomova died.
Although it has been 14 years since her death, Sorkomova's legacy is a harsh reminder for UNBC, as well as CNC, to monitor the mental health of their students closely, particularly their substantial body of international students.
"You're often leaving friends and family, you're leaving your established support net that you have and maybe you move to a new location, you may not know a lot of people, you may need to assert yourself a little bit more to meet people, you're cooking for yourself, you're doing your own laundry, you're doing a lot of things that maybe someone else has been doing for you," explained CNC counsellor George Dunne about the stresses of student life.
Add in the language barrier and culture shock for international students and the pressure on post-secondary students can be overwhelming.
As reporter Peter James wrote in his Monday front page story, according to the 2013 National College Health Assessment, 89 per cent of students surveyed said they felt overwhelmed and 57 per cent said they felt overwhelmingly anxious. Furthermore, 38 per cent said they felt so depressed they had trouble functioning and nearly 10 per cent had considered suicide.
Sadly, we continue to live in an era where emotional weakness is reviled and seeking professional help during times of mental anguish is seen as a character flaw. This stigma co-exists with post-secondary students feeling powerful financial and social stress, many for the first time in their lives, on top of already-existing cultural and family pressure to excel.
The danger is real and the consequences can be devastating.
"All of sudden you're on your own, making your own decisions and you don't have someone helping you out with that," Dunne said. "I would say that the transition is certainly important and it can be very stressful for students. Some people have great mechanisms in order and some don't."
Sorkomova didn't have that transition. She arrived from the University of Sakha Republic in Siberia three weeks after the semester started. Not only did she miss the orientation sessions and social networking function for international students, she had an enormous amount of catch up to do in her classes.
She likely kept ridiculous hours trying to complete past-due as well as current assignments, all in a second language. Exhaustion and loneliness probably evolved into anxiety and depression. She likely wasn't sleeping or eating right. Her attempt at shoplifting probably wasn't the act of a student with an excessive amount of entitlement but was a cry for attention and help.
Fortunately, a student like Sorkomova would now qualify for something like CNC's Back On Track program, which encourages instructors to alert counsellors about signs of depression or other mental health issues seen in students.
January may bring with it a new year and the start of longer days but for post-secondary students, it can bring with it new pressures and an increasing sense of isolation and emptiness. Thankfully, both CNC and UNBC are doing more to help their vulnerable students through these dark days.
