Taken entirely from The Philadelphia Inquirer by Susan Snyder and Sarah Gantz,

On Monday, Eells, a mental health professional who held national counseling posts and specialized in resiliency, died by suicide at the Center City apartment where he lived.

Any death can jar a college community, but the suicide of the man who oversaw programs for students designed to help prevent such acts has hit the Ivy League university hard, particularly for those who looked up to him.

“If someone at the highest level of this resource ladder doesn’t have access to the resources they need to feel safe, I really do worry for everyone else,” said Melissa Song, 20, a senior neuroscience student from Tempe, Ariz., and director of Penn Benjamins, a peer counseling organization.

Matt Tomaselli, 21, a junior from Baltimore and member of CogWell, called Eells’ death "absolutely throttling, sad, and disheartening.”
Eells, 52, had worked at Penn only since March. He came from Cornell University, where he oversaw counseling services for about 15 years and helped that school deal with multiple suicides. He was a national figure in college student mental health, often quoted publicly, and gave a TED talk on resiliency in 2015.

“All of us will face times when our heart is broken,” Eells told the audience then. “Resilience is about what we do with that. Can we make art with those pieces?”

His resilient role model, he explained, was his youngest son, born without his right arm. “I watch him every day overcome something,” Eells said.

Eells’ mother told The Inquirer on Monday that he had been struggling with the new job and being away from his wife and three children, still back in Ithaca, N.Y.

Eells was adviser for national “postvention” guidelines for how school campuses should respond after a suicide. The guidelines include providing a stable campus community that encourages communication without sensationalizing suicide, which can make suicide seem more tangible for those who have contemplated it in the past.He had just been elected for a two-year term as president of the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors, a post he held from 2007 to 2009, and was chair of the Mental Health Section of the American College Health Association in 2014.

“To lose a beloved colleague and friend to suicide amplifies everyone’s levels of shock, disbelief, and sadness,” said Barry A. Schreier, communications director for the association and director of university counseling service at the University of Iowa. “As with any death by suicide, the questions come hard and fast, questions that do not have and may never have answers.”