Campus suicide and the pressure of perfection

Ms. Holleran was the third of six Penn students to commit suicide in a 13-month stretch, and the school is far from the only one to experience a so-called suicide cluster. This school year, Tulane lost four students and Appalachian State at least three — the disappearance in September of a freshman, Anna M. Smith, led to an 11-day search before she was found in the North Carolina woods, hanging from a tree. Cornell faced six suicides in the 2009-10 academic year. In 2003-4, five New York University students leapt to their deaths.

Nationally, the suicide rate among 15- to 24-year-olds has increased modestly but steadily since 2007: from 9.6 deaths per 100,000 to 11.1, in 2013 (the latest year available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). But a survey of college counseling centers has found that more than half their clients have severe psychological problems, an increase of 13 percent in just two years. Anxiety and depression, in that order, are now the most common mental health diagnoses among college students, according to the Center for Collegiate Mental Health at Penn State.

America’s culture of hyperachievement among the affluent has been under scrutiny for at least the last decade, but recent suicide clusters, including the deaths of three high school students and one recent graduate in Palo Alto, Calif., have renewed the debate. “In the Name of College! What Are We Doing to Our Children?” blared a Huffington Post headline in March. Around the same time, the New York Times columnist Frank Bruni published “Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania,” which he was inspired to write after years of observing the insanity surrounding the process — not only among students but also their parents. Numerous other alarms have been sounded over helicopter parenting, and how it robs children of opportunities to develop independence and resiliency, thereby crippling them emotionally later in life. These cultural dynamics of perfectionism and overindulgence have now combined to create adolescents who are ultra-focused on success but don’t know how to fail.

Children “deserve to be strengthened, not strangled, by the fierceness of a parent’s love,” Ms. Lythcott-Haims wrote in a 2005 op-ed piece for The Chicago Tribune. If by adulthood they cannot fend for themselves, she asked, “shouldn’t we worry?”

confuzzled dude wrote:

Ms. Holleran was the third of six Penn students to commit suicide in a 13-month stretch, and the school is far from the only one to experience a so-called suicide cluster. This school year, Tulane lost four students and Appalachian State at least three — the disappearance in September of a freshman, Anna M. Smith, led to an 11-day search before she was found in the North Carolina woods, hanging from a tree. Cornell faced six suicides in the 2009-10 academic year. In 2003-4, five New York University students leapt to their deaths.

Nationally, the suicide rate among 15- to 24-year-olds has increased modestly but steadily since 2007: from 9.6 deaths per 100,000 to 11.1, in 2013 (the latest year available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). But a survey of college counseling centers has found that more than half their clients have severe psychological problems, an increase of 13 percent in just two years. Anxiety and depression, in that order, are now the most common mental health diagnoses among college students, according to the Center for Collegiate Mental Health at Penn State.

America’s culture of hyperachievement among the affluent has been under scrutiny for at least the last decade, but recent suicide clusters, including the deaths of three high school students and one recent graduate in Palo Alto, Calif., have renewed the debate. “In the Name of College! What Are We Doing to Our Children?” blared a Huffington Post headline in March. Around the same time, the New York Times columnist Frank Bruni published “Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania,” which he was inspired to write after years of observing the insanity surrounding the process — not only among students but also their parents. Numerous other alarms have been sounded over helicopter parenting, and how it robs children of opportunities to develop independence and resiliency, thereby crippling them emotionally later in life. These cultural dynamics of perfectionism and overindulgence have now combined to create adolescents who are ultra-focused on success but don’t know how to fail.

Children “deserve to be strengthened, not strangled, by the fierceness of a parent’s love,” Ms. Lythcott-Haims wrote in a 2005 op-ed piece for The Chicago Tribune. If by adulthood they cannot fend for themselves, she asked, “shouldn’t we worry?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/education/edlife/stress-social-media-and-suicide-on-campus.html?_r=0

Marathadi-Saamiyaar wrote:The pressure was always there even 100 years ago. In fact, it was even worse - poverty, very few colleges, distance, lack of exposure, and limited number of jobs.

What is lacking is an informed and supportive extended family who help and support the kids, and the kids learn from the elders on how to handle failures, challenges, illness and death.

I dont think the kids really face any pressure and in fact the opposite..lack of exposure to REAL pressure and learning to cope with it.

Children “deserve to be strengthened, not strangled, by the fierceness of a parent’s love,” Ms. Lythcott-Haims wrote in a 2005 op-ed piece for The Chicago Tribune. If by adulthood they cannot fend for themselves, she asked, “shouldn’t we worry?”

“Tears rolling down his face, he said, ‘Kathryn, the reason I’m living is to pass you off to your husband.’ ”

Marathadi-Saamiyaar wrote:The pressure was always there even 100 years ago. In fact, it was even worse - poverty, very few colleges, distance, lack of exposure, and limited number of jobs.

What is lacking is an informed and supportive extended family who help and support the kids, and the kids learn from the elders on how to handle failures, challenges, illness and death.

I dont think the kids really face any pressure and in fact the opposite..lack of exposure to REAL pressure and learning to cope with it.

FluteHolder wrote:I agree with most of what has been said by Krish/Saamiyaar. I remember attending one lecture by Prof.Subhash Kak about his conversation with his kid who was in college at that time. He mentioned about suicide by  students who have money and everything and  who are very normal may suddenly go to the extreme and they have no experience in coping with pressure due to lack of familial support and/or lack of spiritual/religious exposure/upbringing. I have recently came to know of a real life experience of a distant relative who fantasized everything in FB/whatsapp/social media and not living in reality and this person tried end life and is in a situation where none can help. This is due to lack of parental guidance/support during key years...