When I was a student I was friends with a popular but clearly unstable girl in my class whose mental condition took a nose dive in the summer holiday between the second and third year.

I knew it wasn't the first time she'd had some kind of breakdown, she spoken before a period of time she'd spent incapable of getting out of bed while her boyfriend looked after her.

But when we all came back for the third year, she was all over the place, everyone could see something was terribly wrong, but we were not much more than kids, we didn't know what to do. And for every reasonable voice saying 'you need therapy, you need serious professional help', there was always a louder voice saying 'oh. i don't believe in all that. People just need to pull themselves together'. Which unfortunately was the opinion of her middle-class, rather snobbish parents.

She took an overdose, left a suicide note.

Since then. I've done a lot of soul-searching, wondering if there was anything I could have done. And never really come up with an answer. At age 20. I just didn't have the life experience to know what to do. Now, I would escalate, talk to the course leader, stuff like that. But would that have made a difference? In the long term?

I have my doubts. I think what happened could have been delayed. But that's all.