Student Brings Suicide Prevention Mission to the Next Level

Henry J. Meiser '27 has been an advocate for youth suicide prevention since high school, calling for more student voices in high school and college mental health initiatives.

Now he’s taking his work to the next level, having been appointed as the Governor’s designee representing young adults on the Maryland State Commission on Suicide Prevention.

He originally served as the commission’s student representative from October 2021 to June 2023 and stepped down the summer before starting college at Holy Cross. As the young adult representative, Meiser will serve on the commission at the governor's discretion or until he turns 26.

“I was representing high school students, or anyone under the age of 18 in my former role, and now I’m representing people between the ages of 18 and 24 and in all of the colleges in Maryland,” he explained. 

The more things change, the more they stay the same

Even though he’s advocating on behalf of college rather than high school students, Mesier said one thing has not changed: “Students are the most difficult demographic to represent.”

The commission is comprised of representatives from a variety of backgrounds and experiences including different ethnicities, members of the LGBTQ+ community and those whose lives have been affected by suicide, whether having lost a loved one or personally experienced suicidal ideation. Students can encompass all of these categories, he said, which makes his role of representing them challenging: “I’m having to represent all of those viewpoints. So trying to do so with just my perspective is just not practical because I can only represent my experiences.” 

To address this, Meiser has made it a priority to connect with a variety of mental health organizations and student groups on campuses across Maryland. “I’m really hoping to connect with the people that I’m representing on the commission to make sure what I am voicing and doing in this capacity aligns with what they need,” he said.

More than whomever he represents, the greatest change has been in Meiser himself.

“The biggest difference between now and high school is I’m spending a lot less time figuring it out and I have a better idea of what I can and can’t do,” he said. 

With a clearer understanding of what is feasible, he can pursue his goals more effectively. Among them is to leverage connections in the state legislature to call for laws that provide additional protections for students to prevent academics from exacerbating serious mental health issues. 

“I firmly believe that you shouldn’t have to take an exam if you’re experiencing suicidal ideation,” Meiser said. “At the end of the day, having to take that exam is probably going to add to the stress and anxiety and make that situation way worse.”

“There are states that have that codified into law, that if a mental health practitioner reaches out to your professors, they’re bound [by law] to give you additional leeway,” he continued. “Maryland is not one of those states.”

Balancing act

Near the end of a semester, nearly every student on campus is working on a major project. Meiser is no different, except one of his projects will be headed for the Maryland governor’s office and the state’s legislative assembly. The State Plan on Suicide Prevention is a comprehensive report the commission provides to the governor outlining steps the state can take to lower suicide rates in Maryland, he explained. 

The report is due at the end of the year and often builds on existing state programs, as well as national practices from the U.S. Department of Health and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Alliance.

While his passion for the work means it doesn’t necessarily always feel like work, Meiser said, this can lead to its own issues balancing his academic and commission responsibilities.

“There are times when I put commission work over academics and I end up kicking myself,” he said. “They both get done, but the order they end up getting done changes depending on the week.” 

Though he may only have just returned to the commission, Meiser has been perfecting this balancing act for the past year and a half. From May 2023 to May 2024, he served as a policy specialist on education, school safety and suicide prevention in the office of Maryland State Sen. Katie Fry Hester. Around the same time, he also joined the board of directors of Community Crisis Services Inc., a Maryland-based nonprofit that oversees crisis hotlines, a role that he held until November 2024. Meiser balanced both of these opportunities with his new life as a Holy Cross student, which began in September 2023.

“It can definitely be a lot,” he said. “I need to plan my time really, really well.”

He acknowledged that living in Massachusetts for the majority of the year adds another layer of difficulty to his volunteer work in Maryland, but noted he has become a practiced hand at Zoom and was even able to testify before the Maryland Legislature remotely. “In the wake of COVID, a lot can be done virtually, so I’m using that to my advantage,” he said. 

Despite location-based challenges, the encouragement of Holy Cross professors played a key role in Meiser’s return to the commission. Speaking with some of his professors about his work with suicide prevention and school safety, Meiser recalled they had inquired if he would continue either in Maryland or Massachusetts. 

“At that time is when the governor’s office had reached back out to me,” he said. “[My professors] were just very encouraging to continue that and find another avenue, and it seemed too coincidental that the timing lined up to rejoin the commission.”

Though Holy Cross has its own student mental health initiatives, Meiser plans to stay focused on his home state for now. “I am a firm believer in doing a small number of things and being able to dedicate the proper time to them versus doing many things and not being able to dedicate enough time,” he said. 

Elevate youth voices

In 2021, Meiser gave the keynote address at the Conference on School Safety in Baltimore. “There were about 800 attendees, all of which were middle-aged to older,” he said. “And they were all looking at me like, ‘What the heck are you talking about and why am I listening to a 16-year-old?’”

By the end of the address, those same audience members were approaching him to say how much they had learned. Meiser said this was an object lesson in the importance of a simple concept: “When you’re dealing with school safety, and youth and teen suicide prevention for that matter, the people who know best how to prevent it are students.”

Students are the people who have the necessary peer-to-peer interaction with those struggling with mental health issues, he explained. “For as long as there are people in the education space who are unwilling to hear from young people, these incidents will continue,” he said, “but we see the communities uplifting young people are the ones having fewer deaths by suicide and fewer safety incidents.”