The mother of a University of Exeter student believed to have killed himself after a “disastrous” set of exam results has accused academics of failing to make her son feel like he was “wanted”.
*sighs* Here we go again...
Less than a month before his death last year, Harry Armstrong Evans, 21, told his tutor in an email that isolation during the pandemic had affected his mental health and his performance in his third-year physics and astrophysics exams. But neither academic staff nor the welfare team spoke to the student face-to-face after the email and his mother, Alice, told the inquest into his death on Thursday that her son had not understood he could do re-takes or repeat his final year.
Surely a 21 year old should be expected to do something for himself? It's infants that need spoonfeeding, isn't it?
Addressing the head of the department, Tim Harries, she said academics should have done more to help her son, who had performed well until then. She said: “You should have contacted Harry and said: ‘What’s going on here?’
We were so thrilled he was going to Exeter. We didn’t expect Harry to take his life. It was definitely as a result of these exams.”
Sure, it couldn't possibly be anything else. Anything closer to home. Could it?
A group of parents, including the mother and father of Natasha Abrahart, a University of Bristol physics undergraduate who had severe social anxiety and killed herself a day before she was due to give a “terrifying” oral exam, called for the government to introduce new laws to protect students.
Good grief! No good can come from mollycoddling adults as if they were children, yet we seem hell-bent on it, don't we?
Natashas law: Don't kill yourself before an oral exam. You could be fined up to £5000, face up to two years in prison, or both
ReplyDeleteIt is like the mother of the 18 year old who died after taking Ketamine, blaming everyone but her daughter who chose to take it
ReplyDelete