His College Knew of His Despair. His Parents Didn’t, Until It Was Too Late.

In the days after her son Graham hanged himself in his dormitory room at Hamilton College (NY), Gina Burton went about settling his affairs in a blur of efficiency, her grief tinged with a nagging sense that something did not add up.  She fielded requests and sympathy notes from the college, promising the dean of students a copy of his obituary “so you can see how special Hamilton was to him.” This was why his suicide “makes no sense,” she added in a puzzled aside. But two weeks later, she read her son’s journal and everything changed. Mr. Burton, a sophomore, wrote that he was flunking three of his four classes and called himself a “failure with no life prospects.”