After their 20-year-old son hanged himself during his winter break from the University of Arizona five years ago, Donna and Phil Satow wondered what signs they had overlooked, and started asking" other students for answers. What grew from this soul searching was Ulifeline (www.ulifeline.org), a website where students can get answers to questions about depression by logging on through their universities. The site has been adopted as a resource by over 120 colleges, which can customize it with local information, and over 1.3 million students have logged on with their college ID"s. "It"s a very solid website that raises awareness of suicide, de-stigmatizes mental illness and encourages people to seek the help they need", said Paul Grayson, the director of counseling services at New York University, which started using the service nearly a year ago. The main component of the website is the Self-E-Valuator, a self-screening program developed by Duke University Medical Center that tests students to determine whether they are at risk for depression, suicide and disorders like anorexia and drug dependence. Besides helping students, the service compiles anonymous student data, offering administrators an important window onto the mental health of its campus. The site provides university users with links to local mental health services, a catalog of information on prescription drugs and side effects, and access to Go Ask Alice, a vast archive developed by Columbia University with hundreds of responses to anonymously posted inquiries from college students worldwide. For students concerned about their friends, there is a section that describes warning signs for suicidal behavior and depression. Yet it is hard to determine how effective the service is. The anonymity of the online service can even play out as a negative. "There is no substitute for personal interaction(个人互动才能解决)", said Dr. Lanny Berman, executive director of the American Association of Suicidology, based in Washington. Ulifeline would be the first to say that its service is no replacement for an actual therapist. "The purpose is to find out if there are signs of depression and then direct people to the right places", said Ron Gibori, executive director of Ulifeline. Mrs. Satow, who is still involved with Ulifeline, called it "a knowledge base" that might have prevented the death of her son, Jed. "If Jed"s friends had known the signs of depression, they might have seen something", she said.