Most College Students Suicidal, Pt. 1
I’ll freely admit it — I tried to commit suicide when attending Millersville University. Obviously, I screwed it up. That was way back in 1990, long before I would ever become the Prozac Poster Child that I am today. The pressure I was under was amazing — but it wasn’t from my courses. They were the easy part. The pressure was from my clinical depression.
It fueled a constant fear that I was screwing my life up being an English major. What if being an English major turned out to have been a dumb choice? I was so scared of picking a major, that I let my Mom pick my major.
If you remember nothing else from this post, remember this — choose ANY other major but English.
The Study
Seems that not much has changed for the average college student since 1990. A study done by the University of Texas in Austin reports that about half of all of the college and university students they talked to had suicidal thoughts. And they didn’t just survey a handful — they talked to about 26,000 students in over 70 institutions of higher learning.
Among the findings:
- In a college of 18,000 students, about 1080 will “seriously” think about killing themselves suring the course of one year.
- About two-thirds will think about killing themselves more than once in that year.
- Five percent were brave enough to admit that they had tried to kill themselves at some point in their lives.
Other findings, straight from the source. The emphasis is mine:
The majority of students described their typical episode of suicidal thinking as intense and brief, with more than half the episodes lasting one day or less.
The survey showed that, for a variety of reasons, more than half of students who experienced a recent suicidal crisis did not seek professional help or tell anyone about their suicidal thoughts.
Why College?
You’re under a complex series of hammer-blows while in college. First off, you’re not eating and sleeping regularly, so that’s going to accentuate any depression you may have. Also, you’re under a massive finacial burden that will be with you for the next fifteen years or so. For example, I was told point-blank by my parents that I had to get a degree in four years, because our family couldn’t afford for me to go another semester. (Somehow, I received an Associate’s and a Bachelor’s in four years. Yes, I was scared.)
Another pressure is that you are mourning the last remains of your childhood. That’s hard to give up, even if you had a bad childhood. You are expected to be the dull, boring grown-up you swore you’d never be.
This and many more pressures can cause suicidal thoughts in college students, even the night before graduation.
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