A graduate's personal mission: to foster understanding about psychiatric illness and suicide

By Carla Cantor

Mike Alvarez took his first class in psychology as a high school senior in Jersey City, a distance-learning course offered by a Rutgers–Newark professor to select students via video conferencing.

The course changed the life of the shy, serious boy who emigrated at the age of 10 from the Philippines to New Jersey with his mother and two older brothers. “There are other people like me,” he recalled thinking, “People who struggle with existence.”

Throughout his time at Rutgers, Alvarez has battled depression, resulting in a hospitalization last spring during his junior year. Yet he graduated from Rutgers College this May on time, with a 3.98 GPA and a 4.0 in his major – psychology. During his senior year as a Henry Rutgers Scholar, he completed an independent research project, a literary study of the lives of three artists who committed suicide. For this, he received the Charles F. Flaherty Award, given by the psychology department to the student with the most outstanding thesis and overall performance in the departmental honors program.

For Alvarez, psychology has served as both a field of intellectual inquiry and a refuge for self-understanding. He sought out therapy his freshman year, working with a psychologist at Rutgers for all four years. From that year on, he got involved with “all things psychology,” taking courses in systems of psychology, personality psychology, psychopharmacology, and even graduate-level classes in advanced statistics and psychometric theory.

He worked on a research project that examined the social and emotional influence of fragrance in female adolescent friendship. He co-authored a paper about the plight of youth aging out of mental health services, presenting the research at a national professional conference, and served as research assistant to a professor studying attitudes toward mental illness among university students.

Alvarez finds it troubling that, despite its prevalence, mental illness is so stigmatized, something he hopes to change by talking about his own experience. “Those who don’t suffer from it, don’t understand it. Those who do, don’t talk about it,” Alvarez said. “There is still so much shame.”

He hopes to attend graduate school in clinical psychology. But Alvarez has another dream he’d like to pursue for at least a year: expanding his research on artistic creativity and suicide into a book. His thesis, under the supervision of Rutgers psychology professor George Atwood, explored the lives of three artists, the poet Sylvia Plath, the novelist and playwright Yukio Mishima, and photographer Diane Arbus.

Alvarez examined the artists’ biographies as well as their creative works, and, in both, found recurring themes of traumatic childhood experience that set the stage for lifelong themes and later death. His research suggests a tragic attempt to authenticate their existence through their art and through their suicide.

There are many other artists whose lives Alvarez also would like to examine: among them, writers Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton, and Ernest Hemingway; painter Vincent van Gogh; and musician Kurt Cobain, all of whom committed suicide.

Studies have shown that creative artists are more likely than others to suffer from mood disorders, such as depression and manic-depressive illness, and also have higher rates of suicide than the population-at-large. But Alvarez believes that too often artists who kill themselves are written off as crazy or mentally ill without an empathetic understanding of their suffering.

By exploring the demons that pursued the lives of artists, poets, writers, and musicians who chose to end their lives, Alvarez hopes to shed light on their experiential world. “The list of reasons why people from all walks of life commit suicide is endless, but those who died by their own hands share one thing in common: a feeling of being misunderstood and alone in the dark,” Alvarez said. “Reaching out to people struggling with existence requires a sincere effort at understanding, and that's the first step to lending a hand – dragging them from the voice of despair."