In the wake of a student’s suicide, Brandeis faculty meet with a representative of the Psychiatric Counseling Center, who explains that because of confidentiality rules, “Every single one of the suicides [at Brandeis] has a backstory that I can’t tell you about.”

It’s understandable that, as this post’s headline notes, students don’t want their professors knowing their medical stuff. On the other hand, this means we can’t be of much help when a student’s in crisis. After decades of teaching, I’ve only seen a couple of manifestly troubled students in my classes.

…Northwestern.

… Facebook page!

Sample comment:

In the aftermath of a Brandeis student’s suicide, a professor speaks.

[T]hroughout the memorial, many expressed their exasperation at the senselessness of [Kat] Sommers’ death.

Professor Sabine von Mering … spoke about how Sommers had come to her office hours the previous week to help plan a trip for the class. Von Mering said she was about to read Sommers’ paper for her class when she received the news of her suicide.

“Is it us? Are we making people show us a face?” von Mering asked. “You have to know that the faculty does not expect you to show a face. If you do that, we cannot help you…”

Retired from a high-profile career as an academic psychiatrist, Frances now muses on the expensive and destructive medicalization of human experience in America.

In a recent post, I noted what I called his Post-Diagnostic Regret, his almost anguished reflection on his own implication in what another writer calls psychosprawl — the legitimation of so many behaviors as signs of mental illness that thirty percent of the country is now said to be mentally ill. This is great news for the pharmaceutical industry, America’s Fraud Queen.

In this piece, in Psychiatric Times (registration), Frances turns his attention to a recent, much-reported study.

The New York Times of Dec 20,2010 carried an alarming story. It seems that during the past decade, college students have suddenly become much more mentally ill. The rate of severe psychiatric disorder among those seen in school counseling services used to be 16%– now it has reached 44%. Ten years ago, 17% received psychiatric medicine– now it is 24%.

The jump, Frances suggests, is manufactured.

First, it’s far too easy for students to ace the DSM-IV tests for mental disorders. “[T]he severity and duration requirements included in DSM-IV were set too low, particularly in the criteria sets that define the milder forms of the depressive, anxiety, and attention deficit disorders.”

Second, impressionable and sometimes insecure students see endless slick ads encouraging them to palpate, as it were, their moods. “[P]rofit motivated skewing of public information about illness is rightly prohibited virtually everywhere else in the world,” Allen notes. He reminds readers that along with lavishing us with images of our mental fragility, drug companies have long “lavished physicians with industry-sponsored conferences, free trips and meals, free samples, biased research, and co-opted thought leaders. There [is] one drug salesperson for every seven doctors– sometimes outnumbering the patients in waiting areas. Not surprisingly, diagnosis and medication sales have skyrocketed and profits have risen astronomically.”

Side effects, lifelong stigma, insurance difficulties – these are obvious calamities for the wrongly labeled. More profoundly wounding is “the way a falsely diagnosed student sees himself at a crucial moment of identity formation– the reduction in the sense of personal efficacy, resilience, and responsibility.”

… UD lived in an off-campus Evanston apartment with three – or was it four? – other women.

Turns out there was always a law – the beautifully named Brothel Law – prohibiting more than three unrelated people from sharing apartments and houses in Evanston.

So pissed off are Evanstonians about loud drunken students that the town has now decided to enforce the law. NU students – some of whom will be evicted – are furious. Five hundred of them packed a campus meeting about the situation.

During the forum, Weinberg junior Taylor Barrett read aloud responses from Evanston officials she received after e-mailing them Tuesday to “respectfully express her unease” about the ordinance. Mayor Elizabeth Tisdahl apparently responded by suggesting students ask the administration to change NU’s alcohol policy.

“Perhaps you might consider talking with the NU administration about allowing drinking on campus,” she wrote. “Then all partying would not have to take place in the neighborhoods.”

Ain’t gonna happen. NU doesn’t want its students falling into the lake.

No – here’s one of the better scenarios: The town of Evanston now has NU’s attention. Big time. Evanston knows which houses and apartments are the major offenders, and it should, with increased campus and town police presence on weekends, aggressively target them. NU sends letter to the students and their parents threatening suspension, whatever. Evanston leans on landlords, who also send letters. This high-profile activity scares other students into better behavior.

… poem, Desert Places, I suddenly thought of Frank Zappa’s What’s the Ugliest Part of Your Body?.

I mean, it suddenly seemed a very close parallel – not in terms of style, but in terms of the idea that the scariest desert place is your own mind.

The students seemed to have heard of UD‘s beloved Zappa… Or were they just humoring her?

*******************************

And then there’s this, by Philip Larkin.

If, My Darling

For the skirl of that bulletin unpicks the world like a knot,
And to hear how the past is past and the future neuter
Might knock my darling off her unpriceable pivot.

…whose result (If you’re going to learn, you must read.) is discussed here.

… has been established, in memory of Gabrielle Giffords’ murdered aide, by two graduates of the same university he went to: UC Santa Cruz. The scholarship will fund a “financially needy student committed to a career in public service or social justice.”

… opioid death.

A graduate student at Princeton University kills himself. Before doing so, he writes a long note of explanation.

It’s here.

He was 27. He spent his life trying to lull himself out of feelings of having been deeply and permanently contaminated by a series of rapes he endured when he was a child.

I never liked what alcohol did to me, but it was better than facing my existence honestly. I haven’t touched alcohol or any other drug in over seven months (and no drugs or alcohol will be involved when I do this) and this has forced me to evaluate my life in an honest and clear way. There’s no future here. The darkness will always be with me.

He tried various worthy pursuits.

[N]othing I did made a dent in how depressed I was on a daily basis and nothing was in any way fulfilling.

Freud suggests that many suicides represent homicidal aggression against others turned against the self, and that seems borne out to some extent here.

I feel an evil inside me. An evil that makes me want to end life. I need to stop this. I need to make sure I don’t kill someone, which is not something that can be easily undone. I don’t know if this is related to what happened to me or something different. I recognize the irony of killing myself to prevent myself from killing someone else, but this decision should indicate what I’m capable of.

In his note, Bill Zeller repeatedly calls himself a “broken” person, and he’s right. Broken long ago, he was never able to put himself back together again.

Caitlin Flanagan, in The Atlantic, launches an angry, rather incoherent attack on Duke University, a sort of I Am Charlotte Simmons without the laughs.

Though the piece begins as an attack on Duke’s reduction (as Flanagan sees it) to a distinctively money-obsessed institution (it’s no more money-obsessed than Brown, Northwestern, Boston University, and plenty of other – what do they call them? – basket schools), it quickly shifts to a merciless attack on Ms Sex Thesis herself, Karen Owen (background here and here). Flanagan calls this Duke senior (she was a senior when she researched and wrote the sex thesis; she has now graduated) “one of the most pitiable women to emerge on the cultural scene in quite a while,” onaccounta she got roughed up a bit, sexually and emotionally, by her research subjects, thirteen male Duke athletes, each of whom she sampled in bed and then wrote up in terms of performance.

Flanagan’s piece is an exercise in male bashing and female self-pity. It paints a world of sharp lines between rapacious men and victimized women. And it attacks Duke University as unusually – by the standards of American universities – complicit in this picture.

While UD doesn’t characterize Owen – as some commentators do – as an exemplary feminist for doing what she did (using men, rating them sexually the way men rate women sexually, etc.), neither does she regard Owen as a puling confused little drunkard, her heart broken again and again by the big bad boys. Flanagan doesn’t quote the repeated descriptions of very pleasant sex indeed in the Owen sex thesis — sex that does sometimes get a little rough, but pleasantly so – if “pleasant,” in sexual terms, means that Owen scored an orgasm. Nor does Flanagan quote several rather moving descriptions (at least UD found them so) of research subjects whose quietly intense sexual excitement in response to Owen’s beauty Owen found – as well she might – both humanly and physically gratifying.

None of this is to deny what Flanagan argues at the end of her essay – men are more powerful than women, and women ought not get drunk and stupid. It is merely to say that all the shadings of sex, the complications of compulsion and desire and delight and abasement among adults, are absent from Flanagan’s angry fleshless world.

A letter in the University of Georgia newspaper.

The incident that led to the resignation of The Red & Black’s editor-in-chief is not particularly surprising, given the extraordinary emphasis placed on alcohol and partying in your paper this fall.

The relentless “No. 1 Party School”-themed articles and link on The Red & Black’s website speak volumes — volumes of vodka, as it turns out.

Since 2004 I have contributed 85 published columns to The Red & Black.

But this fall I chose not to submit anything at all, primarily because of my disappointment with the direction of the paper.

I hope the forced shake-up in leadership is a turning point for The Red & Black, which in past years has been the best newspaper in Athens.

John Knox
Assistant professor Athens
Geography

Best comment so far about the yawn heard ’round the world (background here) comes from an Inside Higher Ed comment thread:

Treated like cattle, students will occasionally respond inappropriately.

A hacker has broadcast a message to wired classrooms across Washington State University. Here is some of what he said:

[Why have you come to this university] merely to eat, drink, and breathe? [Unserious people have] infiltrated our once-astute university. [They] run wild in a state of perpetual inebriation [and have] no outward enthusiasm for the fantastic academic culture this university used to have.

The entire video is here. Scroll down.

Très pomo.

And definitely creepy.