Colleges Step Up Battle Against Student Suicide

By: Jennifer Peltz
Posted In: News

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla.- In the minds of many Americans, college students are having the time of their lives. So how come Congress is starting to channel money to psychological counseling on college campuses?

Colleges across and country say more students- and more troubled ones- are seeking help. Student surveys show rising reports of depression and other psychological problems. And some high-profile campus suicides, and related lawsuits, have caught academia’s attention.

In Tallahassee, Florida State University is straining to keep up with a demand for counseling that rose more than 22 percent between the 2003 and 2004 academic years.

At Lynn University, a small private school in Boca Raton, Fla., counselors’ appointment logs spiked at least 35 percent during the 2003 academic year alone.

And the heat isn’t on only at colleges with large numbers of students in their teens and early 20s living on campus. Nova Southeastern University, an institution known for far-flung and online classes, opened a full-time, $600,000-a-year counseling center last year at its home base in Davie, Fla.

Melissa Noya has seen firsthand the tensions that can build to a breaking point on college campuses, and not only because she’s pursuing a doctorate in psychology at Carlos Albizu University near Miami.

As an undergraduate, she was on Florida Atlantic University’s Davie campus one day in January 2002 when gunshots erupted near a Broward Community College building next door. In front of hundreds of students, a Florida International University student killed his former girlfriend, a BCC student, and then himself.

“You sit in a classroom,” Noya said, “and you don’t realize the person sitting in front of you is contemplating suicide.”

Why? Counselors suggest that psychiatric medications are allowing students who once might not have attempted college to do so, bringing potentially serious psychological problems with them.

But psychologists also point to external forces – rising pressure for students to succeed as college becomes more competitive and expensive, an era of uncertainty, and the increasingly common challenge of balancing school, work and family responsibilities.

Add that to a base of academic anxieties, the struggles of adjusting to adulthood and the tendency of some major mental illnesses to emerge in patients between 18 and 24, and perhaps it’s little surprise that the proportion of college students who say they have been formally diagnosed with depression has risen almost 5 percentage points since 2000, according to the American College Health Association.

“There are a lot of good experiences that come out of the college years, but we are understanding that there are a lot of (stresses), as well,” says Jaquelyn Liss Resnick, who heads the University of Florida’s counseling center and the nationwide Association of University and College Counseling Center Directors.

In part, students’ thirst for counseling may simply reflect growing societal acceptance of it, counselors say. But studies also hint that many students have pressing reasons to seek help. Nearly one in 10 say they have seriously considered killing themselves, according to the college health association’s 2004 survey of more than 47,000 students. Every year, an average 1,100 students nationwide do end their own lives, researchers say.

Still, suicide is less prevalent among college students than among their peers who aren’t in higher education, according to a 1997 research project led by a University of Chicago psychiatrist. But student suicides have drawn intense focus in recent years, perhaps because they occur in the folds of institutions that are, increasingly, being held accountable.

Ferrum College, a Methodist school in Virginia, admitted “shared responsibility” for a suicide in 2000. Two ongoing court cases accuse the Massachusetts Institute of Technology of doing too little to help suicidal students.

In part, too, student suicides reverberate because each is a seemingly counterintuitive end to a story of promise and anticipation.

Garrett Smith’s was. He was an Eagle Scout, an active Mormon and a son of a U.S. senator, Gordon Smith of Oregon.

Being dyslexic, Garrett Smith had a hard time in school and sometimes suffered from depression. But he graduated from high school, completed his faith’s traditional two-year mission abroad and went to college in Utah.

During his first semester, his state of mind darkened precipitously. His parents persuaded him to see therapists and try medication. They underscored that his family and church were there for him.

During his second semester, Garrett Smith killed himself in his apartment. He was 21.

“That Garrett eluded me haunts me every day,” his stricken father told fellow senators the following spring, in March 2004.

Smith persuaded legislators to make money available to improve college mental-health services, among other suicide-prevention efforts. The law, which President Bush signed in October, is thought to mark the first time Congress has set aside money specifically for campus psychological programs.

Congress has OK’d $1.5 million for the college programs for this budget year, according to Smith’s office. The federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration expects to have guidelines by June for colleges interested in applying for the money.

Meanwhile, universities are making a variety of moves on their own. With students sometimes waiting two or three weeks for an appointment at Florida State’s campus counseling center, the university is considering subsidizing visits to private psychologists and psychiatrists, Student Counseling Director Anika Fields said.

Some other schools are boosting their own counseling staffs. Boca Raton-based FAU plans to add an eighth full-time counselor this fall, and Miami-based FIU added two this year.

Counseling is being extended in new directions, as well. The University of Florida has counseling graduate students on call to serve as “crisis intervention consultants” in the dorms. The University of Miami has added a social worker to help students with both psychological and practical problems.

Other institutions are trying to broaden their reach by asking professors and administrators to help. At Nova Southeastern, they can order a troubled student to see a counselor, according to student-counseling chief Douglas Flemons. At Lynn, anyone concerned about a student’s well-being can anonymously alert a group of counselors, professors and student-affairs officials, one of whom will tactfully take the student aside to express concern, says Counseling Director Gary Martin.

Some colleges also are turning to those who might understand a student’s anguish best: fellow students. Florida International recently appointed a group of psychology or counseling majors to solicit student views on what students face and need.

At Lynn, trained “peer educators” help lead a required first-year class on handling college itself.

“A lot of students were kind of looking for guidance,” says one of this year’s peer educators, senior psychology major Ron Zavlodaver. ” … Everybody just spoke. And we trusted each other.”

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COLLEGE STUDENTS’ STRUGGLES

Recent studies have found:

One in 10 seeks psychological counseling on campus. Almost 25 percent of those students are on psychiatric medications, up from 9 percent a decade ago.

About 15 percent say they have been formally diagnosed with depression, up from 10 percent four years ago.

More than one in three report having at times felt so depressed they had trouble functioning. Almost 1 in 10 has seriously considered suicide; about 1 in 100 has attempted it.

Researchers estimate that nearly 1,100 commit suicide every year. But the suicide rate is only half that of peers who are not in higher education. Nationwide, the suicide rate among 15-to-24-year-olds has tripled since the 1950s.

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Sources: International Association of Counseling Services; American College Health Association; National Mental Health Association; the Jed Foundation; National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.

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c 2005 South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

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