By Lydia Lim, Senior Political Correspondent

THE thousands of international students in our midst were in the spotlight after two tragic deaths on the Nanyang Technological University campus earlier this month.

The first involved an Indonesian student who had had his Asean scholarship revoked. He stabbed an associate professor before falling to his death.

A few days later, a China national, who was a project manager, was found dead in his apartment on campus.

The Sunday Times polled 100 foreign students shortly after news of the two deaths broke.

Some 58 per cent of those polled said it was common to experience adjustment problems, ranging from stress over studies and finance to the language barrier.

One Cambodian student, Ms Sopheaktra Phann, 20, said she felt so lonely sometimes that she just wanted to drop everything and head home. A business student at the Singapore Management University, she said it had not been easy to make friends as Singaporean students were not always friendly.

Her comment hit home for two reasons.

First, it sparked a process of self-examination which forced me to conclude that I am not always the friendliest person around.

I can easily imagine how many Singaporean students would, like me, prefer to keep to themselves and the small circle of friends they are most comfortable with. Having grown up here, they are likely to enjoy networks of old friends from their school days.

I asked a friend of mine from Penang whether she too found Singaporeans unfriendly. She said in her first few years here, she felt very lonely during festive occasions when Singaporeans went home and celebrated with their families but no one thought to invite her.

The second reason that Ms Phann's comment made me sit up was that it reminded me of my three years as an undergraduate in England, and the waves of homesickness that sometimes washed over me.

I don't remember things ever getting so bad that I wanted to drop everything and fly home. I was fortunate that there were other Singaporeans I had known from junior college studying at the same university. Life would have been a lot lonelier without them.

Not everyone had such an easy time. Two students I knew committed suicide in my final year at university.

One was a fellow Singaporean who suffered from depression and the other, an English girl who hovered on the margins and struck most of us as rather odd.

Not all suicides can be prevented. Some individuals are intent on taking their own lives even though they are surrounded by those who love and care for them. But every life is precious and where possible, we must help those around us to choose life, not death.

In a letter to this paper's Forum Page, Ms Christine Wong, executive director of the Samaritans of Singapore, highlighted certain conditions that can strengthen a person's resilience, moderate the impact of stress and reduce the inclination towards suicide.

These are good physical and mental health, religious and spiritual beliefs, and strong social bonds.

The third area of strong social bonds is where each of us can make a difference to those around us. But the task ahead will not be an easy one.

Scholars who have studied these bonds, which they call social capital, have consistently found that heterogeneous societies tend to have lower levels of this social glue than homogeneous ones. With its many races, religions and large number of foreigners, Singapore most certainly counts as a heterogeneous society.

The three key components of social capital are trust, norms of reciprocity and networks. Social capital is a resource of a society. It links its members to each other and enables them to pursue their common objectives more effectively.

In the Singapore context, political leaders more often speak about a similar concept which they call 'social cohesion'.

Research by social scientists on the correlation between heterogeneity and social capital formation confirms what most of us know intuitively - that people have more trust in and feel more comfortable mixing with those who are similar in terms of income, race and ethnicity.

Scholars refer to this as the 'threat hypothesis', which states that in communities with a high presence of immigrants, locals have more prejudices.

Members of minority groups may also prefer to interact with other minority members if they fear discrimination. This may result in an increase in social capital within the group, but makes the creation of mutual trust and the interaction between different groups more difficult as a consequence of an 'us versus them' way of thinking.

With globalisation and the huge increases in immigration flows around the globe, it is likely that many societies are suffering from a decline in social capital.

That change underlies the strains and stresses that we as a society are experiencing, as the number of foreigners here continues to climb.

Last year, Singapore's population stood at 4.8 million, out of which 1.2 million were non-resident foreigners.

That includes international students, whose numbers rose from 86,000 in 2007 to 97,000 last year. Today, one in five students at our universities is a foreigner.

When people from different cultures and with different habits have to live up close with one another, clashes are inevitable.

Do we, as hosts, dare to extend a hand in friendship to try and bridge those differences?

Earlier this month, the Singapore Tourism Board awarded its 'Friend of International Students' award to Ms Boey Suit Yim, a staff member of Temasek Polytechnic.

She had gone out of her way to help international students adapt to life here, hosting them in her home, visiting them when they were unwell and working with grassroots and volunteer welfare organisations to make them feel welcome.

Unsurprisingly, she has received numerous invitations to visit these students in their home countries.

She sets an example that we could all try to emulate.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.