Long article in the NYT on a subject of steady interest to this blog: University student suicides. The excerpt in my title goes to one of the many conundrums specific to this heartbreaking thing: You want to honor the student, but you’re rightly scared of contagion if you speak too loudly.
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January 26th, 2024 at 9:43AM
I was waiting for you to comment on this essay. But the part I found more puzzling was its endorsement of preventing student suicide through panoptic student surveillance:
“The academic wellness community. It has a slight dystopian ring to it. The all-encompassing beneficent administrative machine, with eyes everywhere. And yet, the circumstances producing these conditions seem to justify it. Many students who struggle with their mental health or suicidal feelings never reach out to a counselor. The school’s goal is to reach struggling students however it can: during classes, on scheduled rest days, through the entire community, including the janitors. W.P.I. is collaborating with the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School on a research project that uses an A.I. mobile app designed to monitor and predict suicide risk among college students who opt in to the study by passively surveilling data and vocal tone.”
We’ll just track everyone’s thoughts all day long, and then no one will ever get a chance to commit suicide. What could go wrong?
January 26th, 2024 at 10:43AM
Yeah, my eyes widened with every sentence in that paragraph.
The problem is that no one wants to be accused of — call it mental profiling. We know rather a lot about suicide in general, and college suicide in particular. Asian males are notably vulnerable, for instance, but how to do anything meaningful with that knowledge?
I’m sure colleges are tempted to reject students whose application essays describe years of psychological difficulties; I’m sure some colleges have been tempted to make enrolled students who threaten or who attempt suicide drop out temporarily (some colleges have indeed tried to make such students take a leave of absence, and they’ve tended to get into trouble for the effort). Most of the stuff you can do might well draw a lawsuit, or bad publicity about how insensitive/prejudiced you are, etc.
I understand why a school suffering a suicide cluster would want to do everything it can to try to save people; but the panoptic approach has more than a “slight” dystopian ring. Plus the unremitting emphasis on suicide might well backfire. Better to begin by looking at your campus and retrofitting it to make it as suicide unfriendly as possible, as a first step. Cornell for awhile stationed security personnel at its gorges…
January 26th, 2024 at 1:50PM
Yes, that’s what my campus did last year when we had two suicides within weeks of each other – they put up fencing over the balconies in the building the students jumped from and that seemed to work. At least, it put an end to the suicides. But before that, they did an infinite amount of mass-therapeutic BS that probably had no salutary effect at all but now has expanded into a permanent edifice – weekly wellness emails, wellness activities, wellness counselors, etc.
This seemed to me to be the troubling thrust of this article – we need more and more of this even though it dilutes or even subverts the purpose of the university (turning it into “an academic wellness community”) and it doesn’t even work! As the article admits at one point, the students who actually commit suicide are not the ones who show previous signs of trouble. They’re not the ones who seek out the fluffy couches of the blue-haired they/them professors to bloviate about their break-ups. (So maybe the blue-haired persons should waste less of their time counseling them and stop demanding that their colleagues all devote themselves to this task.) They don’t go to the wellness workshops. They don’t pet the therapy hamsters. So why are we doing this crap? Why don’t we just stop?
January 26th, 2024 at 3:11PM
The wellness routine will perhaps help normal/neurotic students be a bit better adjusted to college, get over painful breakups, etc. Seriously suicidal students tend to have grimmer, well-established, mental disorders, and the wellness net is unlikely to catch them. Instead, as you say, scoping everyone out all the time for wellness risks turning an intellectual community into a therapeutic retreat.
January 28th, 2024 at 8:16AM
[…] with this earlier post about campus suicide clusters, the problem is not necessarily a lack of school support, though […]