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In the wake of the NYU student suicide…

… a writer for The Daily Beast reviews some of the larger reasons it’s hard to keep university students from killing themselves.

But there are subtler reasons. When UD finishes today’s teaching, she’ll write about some of them.

Margaret Soltan, November 4, 2009 9:42AM
Posted in: STUDENTS

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2 Responses to “In the wake of the NYU student suicide…”

  1. Bill Gleason Says:

    Hmm…

    Do you think that certain types of institutions are more prone to this? Small sample statistics seems to indicate so. Very interested in later post. You’ve tipped your hand, but do you think there is anything colleges and universities can do about this?

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Quick reaction: I don’t think statistics show that some universities are more prone to it than others, despite the stories about Cornell, etc. There are definitely occasional upticks on one campus over the course of a few years, but over the long haul I think I’m correct that no particular campus or type of campus yields significantly higher numbers than any other type of campus.

    I think the Daily Beast article shows pretty well why with privacy and other legal issues there’s not much universities can do. But what I’ll be suggesting is that the impulsive nature of many young suicides (as opposed to the often long-thought-out suicides of older, sometimes very ill, sometimes very longterm depressed people) makes it even harder to anticipate these events. I don’t claim all young suicides are impulsive, but many are, which makes it really hard to do much about them.

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