November 16, 2004

• Scary, geeky report at MIT: (pdf)
• Thanks, Richer. That was an excellent read.
• Well, I've always found Princeton Reviews "Student's happiness" category a slightly less morbid manner of deciding what school to go to...
• Best article I could find, with interesting-looking references.
• Okay, after a bit of research, it seems that A) There are three National Organism you might look into: * The American College Health Association * The Jed Foundation, which exists specifically to prevent college student suicide. * The American Association of Suicidology. B) it seems that the data you want to get doesn't, as of yet, exist in a compiled form. That's why all the surveys talk about "college-aged" people -- they's based on the NCHS statistics. In fact, the Jed Foundation wants to establish a National College Suicide Registry to get accurate statistics about the phenomenon. As their web site says, right now, the best you can do is look for small studies in these organisms' journals and extrapolate from there (or be lucky that they talk about a college you want to know about).
• But, of course, if you only want to look at the trends, there are probably plenty of articles on the subject in these Journals. And you may be able to get them for free from your college library.
• Oh, and to complete the patented 3-comments rambling, you might want to know that, at least in Quebec, 15-24 years old aren't the most affected by suicide. 45-54 years old men are.
• Richer, you get a ) for all your hard work looking into my question, even if the specific thing I asked for isn't there. I appreciate it!
• Specific information: here at the University of Chicago, conventional wisdom holds that we have one a quarter (out of 4000 undergrads), although I haven't heard about one in what seems like over a year.
• (Our one day off [out of 4 total for the year] in winter quarter is called Suicide Prevention Day by the entire College, although it's officially known as Undergraduate Break Day. But we tend to fetishize the idea that the work and life here promote certain . . . negative behaviors.)
• I know this isn't directly applicable to your current situation, egomanaic, as you actually know directly of two cases, but I think a lot of university students self-mythologise suicide rates at their college - just as rustcellar said. I know I was always under the impression that it was a big problem at Cambridge (all hushed up by the college authorities, naturally, with the entirely aprocryphal guarantee of an automatic first if your room mate, neighbour or a close friend topped themselves). But, it turns out:

  BACKGROUND: Anecdote, media coverage and earlier research suggest that the rate of suicide amongst students at Cambridge and Oxford Universities is unduly high. There is also a popular belief that student suicide is common at examination times. METHOD: Student deaths at the University of Cambridge were identified using the University database. The cause of death was determined by reference to death certificates and coroners' inquest records. RESULTS: We identified 157 student deaths during academic years 1970-1996, of which 36 appeared to be suicides. The overall suicide rate was 11.3/100,000 person years at risk. Suicide rates were similar to those seen amongst 15- to 24-year-olds in the general population. There were non-significant trends for male postgraduates to be over-represented and first-year undergraduates under-represented. Examination times were not associated with excess suicide. CONCLUSIONS: Suicide rates in University of Cambridge students do not appear to be unduly high. Soc Psychiatry Psychiatr Epidemiol. 2000 Mar;35(3):128-32

  I believe, from personal experience, that rates of mental problems and anti-depressant use were staggeringly high, but it very rarely translated into even attempted suicide. The two "attempts" that I was personally connected to were both very firmly in the "cry for help" camp, in which there was effectively no severe threat to life. Anecdotal, I know, but I suspect that actual suicide is over-emphasised by the student body, both as a flippant way of dealing with stress, and as a distraction from the genuine problems many students undergo.
• In my undergraduate days, we certainly mythologized MIT suicides. The archetypical story was of the physics student who climbed a tower on campus, cried "Look! I'm a vector!" and jumped to his death. a flippant way of dealing with stress Yeah.
• But if he'd just climbed the tower, wouldn't that mean he was a scalar? That works so much better if you say it out loud.
• That's odd. I went to college in Houston (Uni of St. Thomas... which no one outside of Houston has heard of) and we always heard that Rice University had the highest (per capita) suicide rate in the nation. We never could figure out if it was a myth, mean joke (Rice kids tended to introduce us as "this is my friend from St. Thomas, but don't worry, she's smart.") or the truth. ...not to discount the problem of suicide, of course. I agree that we tend to mythologize suicides at local schools