If Bland did indeed take her own life, perhaps her death could have been avoided, had protocol been followed. While in the county jail, Bland shared her recent mental health struggles with a guard. She said she had been feeling "very depressed," and that she had attempted suicide 2014 following a miscarriage. The Nation reports that according to jail protocol, Bland should have been immediately "seen by a mental-health professional and perhaps hospitalized — or, at the very least, put on suicide watch." This did not happen. Margo Schlanger, a law professor at the University of Michigan, put the importance of this protocol bluntly in an interview with The Huffington Post: "People often say, ‘Well, if somebody wants to kill themselves, they’re going to kill themselves.’ That’s false. If you run a jail with an appropriate degree of suicide prevention, you get almost zero.”