Education: Suicidal Tendencies

If money no longer need keep anyone out of college, it nevertheless adds to the many pressures working on today’s college student. Those pressures are so great that Moderator, a national magazine for college students, last week indicated that suicidal tendencies on U.S. campuses are greater than almost anyone had imagined. In the first authoritative estimate of its kind, the magazine claimed that 1,000 U.S. collegians will kill themselves this year, that another 9,000 will try and fail, and that 90,000 will threaten to do so. Though the figures may seem too tidy, many college counselors consider them conservative.

Projected Figures. Exact figures are impossible to obtain, since suicides in college are kept closely under wraps. Many are recorded as “accidents”—mainly because a suicide leaves feelings of shame and guilt among the living. Moderator Editor Philip Werdell, 25, arrived at his estimates by probing every study he could find, then discreetly burying a question about suicide in a questionnaire on psychiatric services sent to 300 colleges. He got some candid answers, projected the figures from them.

College psychiatrists report that the student suicide rate is about 50% higher than that for either the general population or nonstudents of college age. Men are more efficient—or serious-about suicide than women, succeed in killing themselves three times as often for each attempt. Proportionately more graduate students commit suicide than undergraduates. Barbiturates are by far the most common method, distantly trailed by shooting and jumping.

Unremitting Anxiety. Why do they do it? College has always been a stressful time of facing a decision about one’s life’s work, breaking home ties, confronting new thoughts and values and undertaking the “search for identity.” The difference today, many psychologists say, is that colleges force these decisions on students earlier, that the high costs and the tougher competition for grades apply more pressure. “It’s unremitting anxiety,” says Dr. Edwin Shneidman, a consultant at the National Institute of Mental Health and an authority on suicide. “Every semester is a rat race.” More students today are also bothered by shifting sexual attitudes. If they are not inclined to take advantage of the new permissiveness, they may worry that they are latent homosexuals; if they do take advantage, they often discover that “intimacy without emotion,” as U.C.L.A. Consultant Psychiatrist Robert Berns explains it, produces guilt rather than pleasure or fulfillment.

Who are those who commit or attempt suicide? At one large university, the son of a small-town pharmacist tried to become a physician, as his father had urged. But he flunked chemistry and vomited while dissecting a frog. He wrote a note saying that he had dishonored himself, then shot himself. A highly creative coed at a large Eastern private school scored high marks in some classes, dismal grades in others. She was a loner, obviously unhappy, and she jumped from the 14th floor of the campus library. In her room, authorities found a novel she had completed. Professors said that it showed great promise.

A Midwestern university junior loved boxing, said he enjoyed “outmaneuvering the other guy.” But he constantly felt squelched in class, could not understand why his English papers came back all marked up with critical comments. His roommate explained that the professor was mainly concerned with improving his writing style. “But this is the way I feel, the way I really feel,” the boy insisted. Shortly thereafter, he took an overdose of sleeping pills. A pretty Midwest coed, pressured by exams and upset by the death of her father and then her dog, yearned to join them. She looked up at a sunny afternoon sky, thought, “What better time to leave?,” then slashed her wrists, then snuggled up to her Teddy bear beside a pond. She awoke, cold and bleeding, in time to be saved.

Deeply immersed in youth’s natural agonizings and inclinations toward the dramatic, many college students take their grades, their specialized studies—and themselves—far too seriously. The decisions they face may seem overwhelming, but they face them at a time when a lifetime of options lies ahead. At an age when high spirits and a curiosity about life ought to produce joy, it is ironic that so many choose the one irreversible decision.