This is a good time to think about balance. A student in my department committed suicide two weeks ago, leaving behind a heartbreaking poem about hard work and isolation. (I did not know him.) The department's response was dismal: They're organizing a symposium to celebrate his life and "short but splendid research career". The silence and stigma associated with depression and suicide are not helping the problem -- they are making it more difficult for affected people to seek help. What we need is an earnest conversation about mental health, as advocated by organizations like Active Minds. We need to stop being ashamed to talk about it. We need to know what warning signs to look for in ourselves and in others. And most of all, we need to know how to seek balance in our own lives. But alas, work-life balance is often seen as an euphemism for slacking off, in an environment where we see colleagues routinely putting in 80-hour weeks. Grad school is not for the faint of heart.