Thoughts of suicide haunted Anita Rutnam long before she arrived at Syracuse University. The Winchester, Mass., teenager had a history of mental illness and had even attempted to kill herself. During her junior year of college, she tried again. On a February morning in 1998, just days after a campus counselor recommended she be hospitalized for her suicidal tendencies, Rutnam threw herself off the eighth floor of a Syracuse dormitory and fell 90 ft. to the patio below.
Miraculously, she survived the plunge. But three years later, Rutnam still feels the effects of that day. She walks with a limp,...