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MONDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2015

THE INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

Madison Holleran’s friends, family reflect on Penn’s mental health efforts SOPHIA WITTE Senior Reporter

The friends and family of Madison Holleran, a Penn student who committed suicide last spring semester, see Penn’s new mental health efforts as a move in the right direction, but they believe more must be done to create a stronger sense of community and support across campus. Following six student suicides in 15 months, the Task Force on Student Psychological Health and Welfare published a report last Tuesday that reviewed and made recommendations for Penn’s mental health resources. In reference to the drive for perfection in academics and all aspects of student life, the Task Force report emphasized an approach of “cultural rather than structural change.” “There isn’t an easy fix to this issue, and I think it’s great that Penn is really taking this issue seriously, but I think Penn can do more to help students who are overwhelmed and need someone to go to and trust,” Madison Holleran’s father Jim Holleran said. For Holleran’s father, Penn would more effectively spur the cultural change it hopes to achieve if it also focused on creating official programs, such as a formalized mentoring program in the athletic department, that would encourage students to talk openly about personal issues. “In the Penn environment, I think it’s tough to achieve that level of depth in friendships,” Wharton sophomore Logan Gardner, a close friend of Holleran’s, said. “You think you know someone really well, but then when they go and do something like suicide that you never would’ve expected, you realize you had no idea

Penn launches 24/7 hotline Dispatchers will connect callers with clinicians from CAPS DAVID CAHN Staff Reporter

Students who don’t know where to turn now have a central option for mental health concerns: 215-898-HELP. Penn launched its mental health HELP line on Dec. 1, 2014. Since then, 54 students have called the number. Of these calls, two were made on behalf of a student who the caller wanted to check in on, 17 were transferred to Counseling and Psychological Services and eight were requests for information, according to the Mental Health Task Force report. “This really just is the catch-all for people in the crisis who might not feel they have the energy to look up the numbers,” Vice President for Public Safety Maureen Rush, who sat on the Mental Health Task Force, said. Setting up the HELP line was not a simple task, Rush said. “We had to acquire the phone number, we wanted to ensure that the PennComm call-takers were trained to respond.” Callers reach the HELP line for a variety of reasons. Rush said some callers simply request information about CAPS, others are parents who are worried about their children and still others are students calling for personal help. “Some of the calls might be a parent who says, ‘I haven’t been able to reach my son for a whole weekend. I’m worried,’” Rush said. She said DPS would respond by sending police officers to find the student and ask them to call their parents. Alternatively, she said, a student will say, “‘I’m feeling like I’m wanting to hurt myself, and I need help.’” In this case, the dispatchers will “immediately connect that person to the on-call CAPS person. In urgent cases, DPS will arrange transportation for a person to a hospital, if this is what the CAPS clinician on duty recommends. “We are not psychologists. We are trained to be a crisis center,” Rush said. When students do reach CAPS, the clinicians take over. “There’s a mechanism where the dispatcher keeps the caller on the line and reaches the CAPS clinician on call and connects the two so that the person never goes off the line,” CAPS Director Bill Alexander said. He added that the system is not simple. If a student calls on a Friday, for example, CAPS will follow up multiple times over the course of the weekend. Throughout the weekend, CAPS may send a clinician to visit the student if SEE HELP LINE PAGE 5

GONE TO COLUMBIA BACK PAGE

SEE HOLLERAN PAGE 3

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY IRINA BIT-BABIK

College junior dies of cancer

Alex Bilotti was a mayor’s scholar and member of ZTA JILL CASTELLANO Editor-in-Chief

Alexsandra Bilotti, a College junior, died early Saturday morning of Ewing’s sarcoma. She turned 22 years old last Wednesday. Alexsandra, known to her friends and family as Alex, was a Philadelphia Mayor’s Scholar and member of Penn’s Zeta Tau Alpha sorority. “Alex is the air that I breathe. She

was every breath that I take and she was my sunshine,” Sandy Bilotti, Alex Bilotti’s mother, said. “She was my hero. She was all that I wanted to be in my life. I wanted to be like her and she just gave me strength and she gave me lots of love. I don’t know what I’m going to do the rest of my life without her.” Ewing’s sarcoma is a rare form cancer that affects the body’s bones and tissues. Bilotti was diagnosed at age 11, and she fought the disease for 10 years and eight months. After going into remission for a few years

and nearly being considered a survivor, her cancer returned in 2009. “She always set goals in life and that’s what got her through a lot of this,” her mother said. “The day she found out she got into Penn was one of her happiest days.” Over the course of her illness and its extensive treatment, Bilotti was held back a grade and took off a semester from Penn. After taking some time off again this spring, she had hoped to return to Penn in the fall. “Alex was an amazing young woman who is going to be missed by

the chapter,” Zeta chapter president Julia Peng said on behalf of the sorority in an email. “When Alex first joined Zeta, we ALEX BILOTTI learned of her diCourtesy of agnosis. It made Sandy Bilotti our philanthropy even more personal for us, and we will do everything we can to honor her not only in our SEE BILOTTI PAGE 5

U. City sees an uptick in armed robberies Five armed robberies were reported in a one-week period DAVID CAHN Staff Reporter

Criminals don’t usually like the cold, says Vice President for Public Safety Maureen Rush. Not so this year. Despite low temperatures last week, Penn and Drexel police are facing a spike in armed robberies, with five armed robberies and one unarmed robbery reported between Feb. 7 and Feb. 15. Over the course of approximately one week, two armed robberies occurred on Penn’s campus, and three armed robberies and an unarmed robbery occurred on Drexel’s campus. No suspects have been arrested in any of these cases, and five of the six were highway robberies, meaning the victims were robbed while walking down

ARMED ROBBERY LOCATIONS

the street. The sixth was a residential robbery. The first robbery at Penn occurred at 7:50 p.m. on the 4100 block of Pine. A female student reported a male suspect had pushed her from behind and then asked her to empty her pockets. When she turned around, she saw that the suspect had a small black handgun. She handed over her cell phone before the suspect “got spooked” and ran away, Rush said. The woman described the suspect as a black male, 5 feet 11 inches tall, with shoulder-length dreadlocks and dark-colored jeans. He escaped from the scene in a dark colored vehicle, headed eastbound on Pine Street. The second robbery at Penn occurred at 11:11 p.m. on Feb. 8 on 200 South 38th Street. The victim, who is related to a SEE ROBBERIES PAGE 2

4100 block of Pine St. 200 South 38th St.

Instead of intuition, our choices are tempered and tampered by our fear of not succeeding.” - Jason Tangson PAGE 4

3600 block of Hamilton St. 3200 Baring St. 3100 block of Hamilton St. 3300 block of Wallace St.

GREG BOYEK/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Cockroach problem fixed in Commons Despite health inspection reports, dining hall has maintained the same level of activity JEFFREY CAREYVA Staff Reporter

Following the buzz about a cockroach problem in 1920 Commons, the dining hall remains as crowded as ever. Many students learned of the issue two weeks ago when Under the Button published “The Inconvenient (HealthThreatening) Truth Behind Your Meals,” which detailed several Philadelphia Food Safety Inspection Reports of Penn’s dining halls. But Penn Dining says it has taken measures to ensure the health and sanitation of its facilities. These free, publicly-available reports also reveal various sanitary concerns for Kings Court English House, Hill House and Falk Dining Commons in Steinhardt Hall. Most notably, the reports indicate a lack of cleanliness in the men’s bathroom at Kings Court in February 2013, past evidence of rodent and insect activity at Hill in January 2013, mouse droppings in the main kitchen of Hillel in December 2014 and “live roaches observed in breakfast and ice cream station areas” at Commons last October. The UTB article quickly spread across Penn students’ Facebook walls, provoking some gut reactions to Penn Dining’s food safety practices. “I find it a little worrying that we didn’t find out about the [food safety] problems until someone posted the reports on Facebook,” College freshman JinAh Kim said. SEE COCKROACHES PAGE 7

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