CHICO STATE STUDENT’S SUICIDE FOLLOWS BOUT WITH COVID-19
The day before Riley Christiansen took his life at Lookout Point, the scenic cliffs near Chico State, the 18-year-old searched online for anything to explain his bewildering bouts of memory loss and why he felt so “down.”
“What to do if you start to talk less?” the usually affable college freshman from Clayton typed into a search engine on Nov. 8 and again the day of his death. “What to do if you are losing your personality?”
Two months earlier, Riley had tested positive for COVID-19 during an outbreak that swept campus just a few days into the fall semester. At first, Riley’s case seemed mild — he briefly lost his sense of taste and smell and developed a cough.
But afterward, Kevin and Lisa Christiansen said their son exhibited symptoms of “brain fog” — problems with memory, concentration and sleep, hallmarks of “long-haul” COVID. Beset by short-term memory issues, Riley quit his new job busing tables because he didn’t remember working the night before. In hindsight, his comments to friends and family in the weeks leading up to his death show his increasing distress over changes in his mood and personality.
A year later, that COVID diagnosis has become the focus of questions about Riley’s Nov. 9 suicide. His family’s and friends’ concerns are informed by ongoing research into serious mental health struggles for even those with mild COVID cases.
In April, a study published in the journal Lancet Psychiatry found that up to a third of COVID survivors received a diagnosis for neurological or psychological conditions, including anxiety and mood disorders, within six months of their infection. Among previously healthy survivors, other alarming conditions also have been documented, including psychosis and suicidal behavior.
“In our clinic, we have been seeing people who all of a sudden have new onset hallucinations, delusions and paranoia. These are people who had no psychiatric history before,” said Maura Boldroni, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at Columbia University.
Joanna Hellmuth, an assistant professor of neurology at UC San Francisco’s Memory and Aging Center, never met Riley but says his symptoms sound similar to cases she has seen. “I’ve had people as young as 17 referred to my clinic for postCOVID cognitive changes,” she said.
Riley’s distress is also familiar to others devastated by suspected cases of COVID-related psychosis. In February, Jennifer Price’s outgoing, 48-yearold husband killed himself on his family farm outside Chicago after crippling anxiety and paranoia followed a mild case of COVID.
Tara Gray’s 17-year-old son, Brycen, athletic and outgoing like Riley, died by suicide in their home in Strongsville, Ohio, on April 23. Brycen’s autopsy showed he had COVID, which his mother, a registered nurse, believes explains her son’s rapid descent into agitation and possible delusional thinking.
And Mac Davis, an independent sales rep from Houston, Texas, said he plunged into depression and paranoia earlier this year, shortly after he lost his sense of taste and smell on New Year’s Day.
“I paced around the house, and my wife was afraid of leaving me,” Davis said in his
only daily consolation came from making plans to kill himself. Antidepressants and “discovering a new life in Christ” helped him, he said.
Scientists like Hellmuth and Boldroni are investigating how COVID may cause “brain fog” and other disorders. Boldroni’s research focuses on whether inflammation, caused by the body’s immune response to the virus, unleashes chemicals in the brain that trigger anxiety, depression, hallucinations and suicidal thinking. Researchers at Stanford have found signs of inflammation, genetic changes and impaired circuitry in the brains of people killed by COVID-19, but no evidence of the virus actually invading the brain.
Riley’s parents will never know whether his brain was impaired by COVID; there was an autopsy, but his body was cremated before his brain could be studied.
The day he died, he borrowed a car to give his roommates a ride. The only thing out of the ordinary, his roommates told Butte County Sheriff Office investigators, is that he said, “I love you guys,” before dropping them off.
Riley responded to Kevin’s text at 10:30 a.m., about charging too many movies to his Amazon Prime account. “Got it, Dad,” Riley replied.
Riley’s friends reported him missing at about 4 p.m., a coroner’s investigation said. A half hour later, a deputy found his body at the bottom of the cliff. Riley had apparently walked 100 yards north of the parking lot to bypass a fence built to deter suicides. He had no drugs or alcohol in his system.
Kevin and Lisa said Riley, who had no previous history of anxiety or depression, had had difficulty adjusting as his longanticipated college experience was derailed by the pandemic. Chico closed its dorms, classes went online and parties at the school’s famously social campus were banned. Riley had to quarantine for two weeks, then scramble to find offcampus housing. And at Theta Chi, an unregistered fraternity, he and other pledges became the targets of verbal abuse, sleep deprivation and pressure to run errands for senior members and consume large amounts of alcohol, his parents later learned via a campus hazing investigation.
It was typical of Riley — “the most unselfish person you’ll meet” — not to complain too much about anything, said Mike Mann, a good friend since kindergarten, who visited Riley at Chico a few weeks before he died. Riley seemed to be his usual self — mostly.
But Riley was slipping away. Several nights before his death, according to the coroner’s report, he called his high school girlfriend, who was attending college in another state, and told her he was thinking about jumping off a cliff. Lisa said she learned that his girlfriend tried to talk Riley through his “dark thoughts.” When she pressed him, he assured her he was fine.
But he wasn’t. Four days before he died, Riley searched for “cliffs near me” and “high elevation near me.” On Sunday night, he and Lisa had a friendly phone chat and made Thanksgiving plans. The next morning, Riley’s final search was for the “SAMHSA Hotline,” the 1-800662-HELP number for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. He never made the call.
If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts, call the tollfree National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273TALK (8255). The lifeline is manned 24 hours a day, seven days a week.