TEDx invited Dr. Eunice Yuen to speak to Choate students for National Suicide Prevention Month.
By Adrian Torres ’25
In honor of National Suicide Prevention Month, TEDxChoate Rosemary Hall held its first interactive salon event in the Andrew Mellon Library’s Reading Room on Friday, September 22. This TEDx event was in collaboration with the Wellness Committee, Counseling Team, and Yale Compassionate Home, Action Together (CHATogether), a program using drama vignettes as educational tools to promote wellness. The presentation featured Dr. Eunice Yuen, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Yale New Haven Hospital, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, and the founder of Yale CHATogether.
As part of National Suicide Prevention Month, TEDxChoate founder and director Yoyo Zhang ’24 and assistant director Sunny Vo ’24 organized the event with the goals of spreading awareness about rising suicide rates among adolescents and discussing methods to support those in need in a boarding school setting.
“We wanted to create a comfortable space to discuss and talk,” Vo said. “We also wanted to equip students with necessary skills or tools to prevent suicide from happening to themselves or to the people around them who they care about.”
The event began with a screening of the TEDx talk “The fight against teen suicide begins in the classroom,” in which a teacher described her experience with losing students to suicide. Dr. Yuen then followed up the video with research statistics on the increasing trend of teen suicide, along with real-life cases that she has worked on.
“The big takeaway I have from the event is that there’s such a staggering amount of people that are considering suicide. The statistic was one in every five, and that was mind-blowing to me,” said Kiran Makam ’25, a leader of the Wellness Committee.
Dr. Yuen also spoke on using mindful, productive, and human-centered language when discussing suicidal ideation and action. For instance, suicide should not be framed as a crime that is “committed”; rather, one should use neutral phrasing like “died by suicide” to strip away the implicit judgment. “It is important to acknowledge and understand the ways in which our vocabulary can further stigmatize the notion of suicide which can cause far more damage than we realize,” participant Zainab Khokha ’24 said.
Dr. Yuen also shared ways to best support others in need, including listening without judgment, validating others’ feelings, and suggesting reliable venues for seeking professional help. “What Dr. Yuen stressed a lot was that a person with no clinical experience or training should not take on the responsibility of being someone who is trying to provide therapy or assistance in that way,” Khokha said. “At the end of the day, let them know you’re there for them.”
During the event, attendees also participated in small discussions in response to prompts and a skit performed by members of the Wellness Committee. “We wanted people to feel empowered to think of and create their own solutions within this given context,” Vo said.
Reflecting on the main message of the event, Ada Tieanworn ’26 said, “It’s important for all Choate students to know that you may think you’re alone and the only one experiencing some sort of stress or something negative, but just know that you’re not, and there are people around you to help.”
Providing a safe space to explore difficult topics is crucial for increasing awareness and breaking the silence as a community. “We really hoped to embrace a safe community to talk about suicide prevention, especially in a school setting,” Dr. Yuen said. “I hope that we can do something together in creating a supportive community to break stigma about suicide, and we can really do our job to prevent suicide from happening.”
