The following notice was sent Thursday afternoon to individuals at MIT and Harvard Medical School by representatives of the joint Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology (HST) program. Eliana Hechter was a student in HST who had been working toward an M.D. degree from Harvard.
To the Harvard Medical School, MIT, and HST Communities:
It is with great sadness that we report the untimely death of Dr. Eliana Hechter, a first-year MD student in HST. Her family notified the medical school this morning, and have not yet made definitive plans regarding services or a memorial. As information becomes available, we will share it with you. We encourage students, administration, and faculty to come together as a community to remember Eliana as a student with tremendous promise, and one who has been lost far too soon.
Losing a member of our community is always difficult and we want to remind you that there are resources here to help you with grief or stress (please see below).
David Cohen, Emery Brown, Matthew Frosch, Patty Cunningham, and Rick Mitchell
— on behalf of HST
MIT Medical’s Mental Health and Counseling Service
E23 — 3rd Floor
On weekdays: call 617-253-2916 to schedule an appointment
For more urgent issues, visit them during walk-in hours on weekday afternoons from 2–4 p.m.
For very urgent issues, call one of the numbers below; a mental health clinician is on call and available 24 hours a day, seven days a week:
Weekdays (M-Th 8 a.m.–7 p.m., F 8 a.m.–5 p.m.): 617-253-2916
Nights/weekends: 617-253-4481
Chaplains at MIT
Contact information for individual Chaplains is available online here:
http://studentlife.mit.edu/rl/mit-chaplains
MIT’s Office of the Dean for Graduate Education (ODGE)
3-132
The office provides two pamphlets, “How to help someone in distress” and the MIT Medical brochure “Caring for our community.”
