Dec 9, 2008 -- On Sept. 24, 2000, after walking up and down the span of the Golden Gate Bridge for 40 minutes, Kevin Hines could no longer shut out the voice in his head. “You must die. Jump now!” it screamed. The troubled college student had signed a suicide note to his friends, family and girlfriend during class just a couple of hours earlier. He believed he was a burden to them. This felt like his only option. So he jumped. The four seconds that it took him to hit the water changed everything. “At the moment of freefall I said, ‘What have I just done? I don’t want to die. I thought it was too late.” Miraculously, Hines survived the 75 mile-an-hour fall. Those fleeting moments shocked him into reality. “No longer was I hearing the voices. I just told myself to get to air and find some way to live.” Hines shared his story of severe depression and suicide with a crowd of 140 students, alumni, staff and faculty at “Suicide and Mental Illness Discussed,” hosted by Active Minds at YU, a local chapter of the student-run mental health education organization Active Minds on Campus, and sponsored by the YU Counseling Center, the Yeshiva Student Union, and the student councils of Yeshiva College and Stern College for Women, on Dec. 8. “Unfortunately, people who struggle with a mental illness are stigmatized so it was important to have Kevin speak in the candid way he did to help students realize that a person with a mental illness is just as human as a person with diabetes, hypertension, cancer or any other illness,” said Asher Morris, founding president and executive director of Active Minds at YU. Hines has shared his story on national news programs and with thousands of people across the United States. He is a member of the speaker’s bureau of the National Mental Health Awareness Campaign and is working with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and the Bridge Rail Foundation to raise the rail on the Golden Gate Bridge to prevent suicides. He spoke articulately to students about his struggle with bipolar disorder, recounting the extreme paranoia, terrible depression, and visual and auditory hallucinations he experienced. “My depression made me think that I was a horrible human being, that I wasn’t worthy of being on this earth,” he said. “I was suffering so deeply that I was in deep denial. I didn’t tell anyone. I stopped taking my medication and stopped going to therapy. I thought to myself, ‘I had played football at varsity level and was on student government – why did I have to deal with this stuff?’” Asher Morris said that people like “Kevin showed students that a person with a mental illness can get married, have a job, be funny, make a difference in the world, and live a normal, successful life.”