In response to the five students that have recently taken their own lives during the current academic year, Lisa Zapata, senior associate vice chancellor of academic and student affairs at N.C. States University expresses our universal hope, “I think that we would all wish there was and easy fix. I wish that was something that we could do right this second and solve the problem, and no one else would die.” (N&O, 2023) The unfortunate truth is that there is no simple solution. For all of our efforts to remind our children that, “It’s not the end of the world.”, that, “I know that it seems like it will never get better but it will.”, and/or other platitudes and miscellaneous statements that we mean to be helpful and supportive, . . . suicide continues to be (and in fact is becoming the more prevalent) cause of death among college-age young adults. Per the CDC, “Suicide is among the leading causes of death for young adults and college students (CDC, 2020). Students with depression or anxiety are at increased risk for suicidal thoughts and behaviors (Casey et al., 2022).” Sadness and anxiety seem to be the universal here, and it generally begins before college years. Per Rosenbluth and Hammond, “37% of high school students reported they experience poor mental health during the pandemic, and 44% reported they persistently felt sad or hopeless during the past year.” (N&O, 2023)
Why? Our children enjoy a standard of living and what the world as a whole would perceive as a very privileged existence. Most enjoy good physical health, are free of hunger, attend quality schools, both public and private. What in the world is happening here? I mention these because Zapata reminds us in her commentary that “food insecurity, housing insecurity and financial pressures”, are among the struggles that affect college student mental health. I do not discount or underappreciate these challenges, but are they new? Is the “struggling university student”, really a novel thing? I just don’t think that the explanation for an increase in suicide can be laid neatly at the feet of these stressors. The authors suggest that efforts to create a “greater sense of belonging” and offer greater (and easier) access to counseling services. Social groups (fraternities, sororities, etc.), clubs, social networks of all types have been at the center of university life for over a century. The availability of counselors-to-students at N.C. State exceeds the ratio recommended by the International Accreditation of Counseling Services. Likewise, these partial solutions (which are already implemented and in practice) appear to largely, fall flat. This is a proverbial “WTH” moment here.
Sara Pequeño shares another frightening observation about the suicides at N.C. State and generally. “. . . suicide is oftentimes private and isolation. Several of the cases this semester, they weren’t even on the university’s radar screen.” In 2021, I lost a close friend to suicide, . . . a forty-two-year-old, professional and entrepreneur, by all outward appearances a successful, reasonably well-adjusted adult. A bad break-up put him into a downward spiral, one from which he could not recover. In hindsight, statements that he made, things like, “Do you think that I am going to be ok? Do you think I’ll feel better later?”, haunt me as do my simplistic responses which were largely, “Don’t worry, bro. You’re going to be ok. The sun will rise again tomorrow and with it, the promise of a new beginning, new adventures, new accomplishments. Talk to me about finding your happiness.” My ‘helpfulness’ came up short. Less than twenty-four hours after missing a lunch with me, he decided that things would never get better, that he would never find his way out of the dark place. He curled up in his shower, wrapped his head in a blanket, and shot himself. My point here is that he was an adult, a person with all of the ostensible features of a successful man, with the social connection, “belonging”, and access to mental health services to which Pequeño refers. Pequeño also states, and I find this particular line of thought prescient and instructive, “To look at suicide as the crisis it is, the university system must be willing to put time, money and effort into addressing both the root of the problem, and its symptoms.” (“Root” being key, and emphasis by me, not the author). Unfortunately, the root may often be laid at the feet of the student’s parents and his or her in-home environment.
I’ll leave one more observation here that I believe is worth mentioning and bears particular significance to the extant crisis. A child of a suicide, be it parent, guardian or whatever adult role model influences the child, is statistically far more likely to commit suicide. “Losing a parent to suicide makes children more likely to die by suicide themselves and increases their risk of developing a range of major psychiatric disorders, according to a study led by Johns Hopkins Children’s Center that is believed to be the largest one to date on the subject.” (Dr. Holly Wilcox, Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 2010) With one’s parents and role models, a child establishes his or her first sense of “belonging”, a factor identified by Zapata. Is it really a stretch to understand that a college student’s contemporaries and colleagues become his or her surrogate family, that seeing one die at his or her own hand would not have the same deleterious emotional effect as a parent’s suicide?
N.C. State University is my undergraduate Alma Mater. My father was a professor at N.C. State for forty years. One or more of my three children will in all likelihood choose to attend the same excellent institution. I want to be able to trust my kids’ safety to a system that I love and which gave me a rich academic and university experience. We have to get this right.