Campus Suicide

Abstract

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, mental health specialists have begun to track a disturbing spike in suicide and suicide attempts among college students. The data grows significantly more alarming if the numbers of those students who have had serious thoughts about suicide (known as suicide ideations) are factored in. It is a measure of the problem of campus suicide that the problem of campus suicide itself has yet to actually be measured (Shadick & Akhter, 2013).

Overview

No one is entirely sure how big the problem of campus suicide is or even how to go about measuring the problem (Brandt, 2014). Universities are reluctant to share data, fearing a public relations nightmare or even lawsuits; families often do not understand the depth of the problems their family members face; doctors and counselors are bound by confidentiality; the students themselves keep much of it to themselves, wrestling with the perception that such thoughts inevitably imply a weakness, a flaw or personal failure, a significant complication given that so many college students come from a background in which they (and their talents) have been celebrated by parents and teachers. How can they admit now they are struggling? Indeed, much data on campus suicides comes to light only after the suicide itself.

What reliable numbers do exist are disturbing (Westefeld et al., 2006). Depending on which database is used, since 2000, suicide has been listed in turn as the first, second, and/or third leading cause of death among people between the ages of 15 and 24. That is a significant discrepancy, but what is clear is that suicide is too widely perceived as an alternative for students struggling to handle the challenges of college life. The other most common causes of death among young adults have themselves been linked to suicide ideations—reckless behavior, accidental overdoses, alcohol poisoning, and automobile accidents.

College students are traditionally perceived to be among the most promising elite in their age group: smart, talented, confident, forward-looking, determined, dedicated to success, often privileged, and presumably the product of strong families and solid upbringing. On the threshold of apparently promising futures, such students are sometimes assumed to have hardly had the time or the inclination to brood about death. Contemplating big existential questions about the meaning of life is expected to be a part of college experience, as are romantic entanglements and other sources of emotional confusion and pain. Reckless behavior has always been associated with the sudden freedom of college life (most famously celebrated in the iconic 1978 film National Lampoon’s Animal House). A certain cult of self-destructive energy is seen as natural to the age group, represented in pop culture icons who imploded young and left behind a dark, lingering charisma. Nevertheless, college students are expected to be too forward-looking, too pragmatic, and too tenacious to actually concede to the logic of suicide.

In many ways, mental health experts believe that the stereotype of college students as the "best and brightest," perhaps more than any other influence, has engendered the current spike in campus suicides. The syndrome, known as Duck Syndrome or "Effortless Perfection, suggests that students struggling with suicide ideations go about their day to day life as if they are feeling fine. They attend classes and engage in ordinary social interactions, but all the while they are churning inside, depressed, anxious, uncertain, like a duck swimming peacefully along the surface while under water, their feet paddle furiously and with great agitation (Travers, Randall, Bryant, Conley & Bohnert, 2015).

As of 2015, there still exists no defining study on the problem of campus suicide, no single generally accepted data profile. Mental health professionals face enormous problems determining what to look for. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2014, there were 11.1 suicides for every 100,000 people between the ages of 15 and 24. Other data indicate the number may be closer to a 1,000 annually. Any number is ultimately unreliable as families often represent suicides as accidental fatalities. More problematically, there are few ways to track suicide attempts. Further, mental health professionals have difficulty determining what can be considered "serious" indicators for suicide. Students too often refer to suicide in casual conversation for hyperbolic effect, and the culture-chic of goths and other social groups that embrace the "dark side" presents in eccentric dress, make up, and body art that is intentionally alarming to parents and society generally. Student writing that explores depressing themes may reveal past trauma or active pathologies or may be creative invention, and hence both harmless and therapeutic. It is challenging to gather data on students thinking about suicide when doubt, disappointment, and anxiety are endemic to college life and nearly everyone experiences at least a passing thought about the "easy escape" of suicide.

Data gathered from university counseling centers since 2000 suggests that more than half of college students in the United States have thought about suicide. Between 2006 and 2013, a spate of suicides on prestigious campuses—most notably the University of Pennsylvania, Appalachian State University, Cornell, and Tulane—sparked a national debate on the problem. That national debate, in turn, encouraged universities to begin to look into how to better manage student mental health services and provide the professional support necessary to encourage troubled students to seek help and find their way to resilience in the face of the often daunting challenges of college.

Applications

Mental health experts are quick to point out that the factors that play into suicide in demographics other than college students play a role in campus suicides as well. Genetics and family history play a significant role, for example. Studies have long indicated that the predisposition to suicidal thoughts can run in a family. Mental health issues such as schizophrenia, depression, paranoia, and bipolar disorder, are sometimes being treated at the time of the suicide or, as is far more often the case among college students, have not been diagnosed properly. Substance abuse is often perceived as an essential coming-of-age element of the college experience, and the reckless consumption of alcohol and/or drugs is both common and conducive to a deterioration in students with underlying mental health issues.

Reckless risk taking may also be an indicator of suicidal ideation. Impulsive decisions often reflect adolescents’ poor judgment: texting while driving, for example, or doing some kind of crazy stunt in the hope of going viral on YouTube (termed Jackass Syndrome for a popular MTV program in the 2000s in which actors performed pointlessly dangerous stunts). Psychologists believe that deaths resulting from reckless behavior reflects not so much self-destructive tendencies as a conviction, based on a childhood spent immersed in the game world of virtual reality, that death is somehow not real, that they are in fact immortal.

Specific to college students is the emotional trauma of college life. Students who elect to attend college away from home experience for the first time life without parental supervision. Independence, however, brings with it responsibilities and the potential for loneliness, isolation, and alienation. Friends, family, teachers, even familiar neighborhoods and landmarks are gone. Many students struggle to find their place, to find new friends, to fit in. Homesickness becomes a constant stressor, bringing with it physical manifestations such as sleeplessness, nausea, poor focus, general nervousness, and irritability. Students can lose perspective and begin to believe that their problems are insurmountable. In seeking a social group to belong to, students may indulge in behaviors or activities that interfere with studies or adopt an unhealthful lifestyle. Students may feel overwhelmed by challenges and try to cope by normalizing symptoms such as weight loss or drug use as par for the course. Seeking help is often perceived by high achieving students as an admission of failure (Landphair, 2007).

Popularity and social acceptance are not the only pressures college students feel. In addition, money can be a tremendous stressor. Students, often not exposed to the realities of personal finance while growing up, must suddenly make ends meet. This often means taking low-paying, time-consuming, and unsatisfying part-time work to minimize the long-term impact of loans while at the same time maintaining a strong academic record. Further, students usually receive some financial support from home, which may vary greatly depending on parental resources. Students who must work and live on a tight budget may not be able to enjoy the same leisure activities as their more amply funded peers and may suffer from feelings of inadequacy, deprivation, or ostracism.

Mental health experts have suggested a far more pervasive problem facing specifically college students that might help account for the increase in suicide and in suicidal thoughts. College students are expected to be confident and competent and ready. They have evolved in a high school system in which they have been massively supported by teachers and staff. They have dedicated the better part of two or more years to the rigorous process of simply gaining admission to the college of their choice. They are accustomed to success—in the classroom, in extracurricular activities, in their community. In many cases, however, students’ lives, including their day to day routines and even their long-term life plans, have been directed by their parents. As college students, they are expected to thrive on their own in a competitive academic environment. Often, they are not ready.

On their own for the first time, these students often face intimidating challenges and experience entirely new doubts about their talents and abilities. Without parents hovering over them (termed "helicopter parents") and without parents to clear all obstacles for them ("lawnmower parents"), these students must figure out who they are, why they are in college, why they are even in the field they are committed to. Ironically, loving and supportive parents sometimes undermine their child’s college experience by failing to prepare them for living independently. Students who were high achievers in high school, driven by parental and self-imposed expectations, may become terrified of the possibility of failure. They may lack both the resiliency to engage in struggle and the vocabulary for feelings of vulnerability. A poor grade on a single test can upend their entire life-assumption. A run-in with a new roommate can trigger extraordinary fears. A passing comment posted on a social media site can create immense emotional turmoil. A Friday night without a coterie of friends can create unmanageable stress. Such students lack resiliency because they have never had to develop such a virtue.

Because universities traditionally have been reluctant to address such problems, deeming such anxieties part of the normal adjustment to the new responsibilities of adulthood and believing that they will pass, students often feel as if they are somehow inadequate for having such anxieties. Feeling overwhelmed, they resist seeking out whatever counseling services the college might offer, fearing that the stigma of mental illness would label them as weak, unprepared, a failure, or that exposing a need for assistance would jeopardize the future they have planned. Distressed students may resist confiding in new friends as this might significantly alter their chances for long-term friendships. They resist confiding in parents because of the perceived disappointment such confessions might trigger. Professors, even when they may suspect emotional stress, often resist approaching students out of fear of blurring professional boundaries or potentially facing disciplinary action or even litigation in the event of a misunderstanding or poor outcome. It is too easy for such students to feel isolated and alone and at dead ends. For some suicide seems to represent the clearest and most logical solution.

Viewpoints

Parents, educators, counselors, psychiatrists agree that the only real solutions to campus suicide are awareness and communication (Rao, Taani, Lozano & Kennedy, 2015). Universities, in cooperation with mental health and student counseling agencies, have begun to introduce a broader range of student services to offer students the chance to reach out for help. During orientation sessions for both incoming students and their parents, universities discuss openly and frankly the reality of college stress and how feelings of anxiety, stress, and depression are a part of the college experience. Colleges emphasize that failure and doubt will be a part of the experience. Universities are providing protocols that allow for a student to step away from college for a period of time and then return when that student has had a chance to learn how to better manage their anxieties. Students are reassured that such anxieties can actually be addressed through effective (regular) confidential counseling services. In addition to offering organized study groups for particularly rigorous classes, universities have created sessions designed to improve student organizational skill, time management, and problem solving to help empower students to engage college life prepared and aware.

Universities also stress the importance of students finding a niche—a specialty-interest organization or a club sponsored by a community volunteer group or church—as a way to get away from classes entirely and "promote a sense of belonging" (Washburn & Mandrusiak, 2010). Students are encouraged to find time for regular exercise as a way to help handle stress or to explore avenues of spiritual expression from traditional institutional religious services to yoga or meditation. Because as many as 20 percent of campus suicides and suicide attempts involve issues related to sexual orientation (Johnson, Oxendine, Taub, & Robertson, 2013), universities have established so-called safe zones where students confronting questions about their sexual identity can find counseling in a non-judgmental environment. Finally, there is the growing role given to residence assistants (RAs). More and more universities have begun to recognize the pivotal role RAs can play in helping troubled students. Not quite students, not quite professors, not quite friends, not quite authority figures, RAs, as part of students’ dorm life, are uniquely positioned to identify potential problems in student behavior early and can, in turn, direct those students toward appropriate professional assistance.

Terms & Concepts

Duck Syndrome: In psychology, a term given to the distressed state of a student who appears to be happy, confident, and in control while in reality plagued by doubts, fears, and anxiety.

Helicopter Parents: Parents who, with good intentions, act to direct the critical life decisions and day to day routine of their children, often into young adulthood.

Lawnmower Parents: Parents who, with good intentions, intervene to remove all obstacles from their children’s lives rather than allowing their children to problem solve their way past the obstacle.

Residence Assistant: In university housing, an appointment extended to an upper class student or graduate student who, in return for a stipend, lives in a dorm and monitors dorm activity among underclass students and enforces university policies.

Safe Zones: Non-judgmental environments where students confronting questions about their sexual identity can find counseling.

Stigma: A mark, usually figurative, of condemnation or shame as a result of unaccepted behavior that may attach to a person’s reputation.

Suicide Ideation: An idea about a specific act of suicide at a specific time and often a specific place as opposed to a general free-floating fascination and/or obsession with suicide.

Bibliography

Brandt, P. (2014). College can be killing: United States college and university responses to student suicide during the 20th century and early 21st century. Journal of College Admissions, 222, 34–38. Retrieved December 20, 2015 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=97394363&site=ehost-live

Johnson, R. B., Oxendine, S., Taub, D., & Robertson, J. (2013). Suicide prevention for LGBT students. New Directions for Student Services, 2013(141): 55–69. Retrieved December 20, 2015 from EBSCO Online database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=86369052&site=ehost-live

Landphair, J. (2007). Campus commons: Never perfect enough. About Campus, 12(1): 25–27. Retrieved December 20, 2015 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=24629999&site=ehost-live

Rao, S., Tanni, M., Lozano, V., & Kennedy, E. (2015). Educating students about suicide. College Student Journal, 49(20), 217–224. Retrieved December 2015 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=103235375&site=ehost-live

Shadick, R., & Akhter, S. (2013). Suicide prevention in a diverse campus community. New Directions for Student Services 2013 (141), 71-81. Retrieved December 20, 2015 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=86369054&site=ehost-live

Travers, L., Randall, F., Bryant, F., Conley, C., & Bohnert, A. (2015). The cost of perfection with apparent ease: Theoretical foundations and development of the effortless perfection scale. Psychological Assessments, 27(4), 1147–1159. Retrieved December 20, 2015 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=111718989&site=ehost-live

Washburn, C., & Mandrusiak. (2010). Campus suicide prevention and intervention: Putting best practice policy into action. Canadian Journal of Higher Education, 40(1), 101–119. Retrieved December 20, 2015 fro, EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=55149555&site=ehost-live

Westefeld, J., Button, C., Haley, J., Kettmann, J., Macconnell, J., Sandil, R., & Tallman, B. (2006). College student suicide: A call to action. Death Studies, 30(10), 931–956. Retrieved December 20, 2015 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=22493957&site=ehost-live

Suggested Reading

Griffin, G. (2010). "The events of October": Murder-suicide on a small campus. Detroit, MI: Painted Turtle Press.

Lamis, D. A., & Lester, D. (2011). Understanding and preventing college student suicide. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas.

Sharkin, B. S. (2006). College students in distress: A resource guide for faculty, staff, and college community. New York, NY: Routledge.