Back in March 2010, the body of William Sinclair, a sophomore engineering major at Cornell University, was recovered by police near a bridge that traverses one of the gorges that cuts through the school's Ithaca campus. Matthew Zika, also studying engineering, did the same from another bridge the next day. Within six months, after Sinclair's and Zika's deaths, another four students had followed their steps, nearly making Cornell known as a "suicide school."
Mary Travis, a popular and artistic sophomore from Texas attending Tulane University, committed suicide in her dorm back in November 2014. Daniel Rupert, another sophomore, killed himself in his dorm room the September of that same year.
Madison Holleran, a student at the University of Pennsylvania, was what girls envied to be before she committed suicide in January 2014. Kathryn DeWitt was hospitalized and put on medical leave from the University of Pennsylvania for the same reason Madison decided to commit suicide - the pressures of being successful, while still partying and living "the college dream."
As proposed in my previous article, Some Words for the Depressed, "What is it about going to college that causes students to feel pushed off the edge (literally)? Some blame helicopter parenting. Most say it's the pressures of society that advocate for career and economic success - the same pressure that says if you don't accomplish these things, you're a failure and no one wants anything to do with you. But social media is also to blame."
In the article Suicide on Campus and the Pressure of Perfection, William Alexander, director of Penn’s counseling and psychological services, made note of how "a small setback used to mean disappointment, or having that feeling of needing to try harder next time,” but now, "a mistake has incredible meaning” for some students.
The worst part of it is that counseling services have cut back on providing care for their students even as more and more of these kinds of tragedies have occurred over time. For one, Ramapo College of New Jersey now only allows for 15 sessions a semester, and 30 in total out of the student's four years at the college. Tulane University announced that its Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) "will offer the same services that have been offered in the past on a short-term basis." If further services are needed, the staff are supposed to assist students by giving them time and information to find other specialists to attend to their needs.
While students who attend Tulane University may be given a generous amount of time off to help tame mental health issues, they half-heartedly send a student away with merely a list of psychiatrists and their telephone numbers. This is exactly what had happened with Shefali Arora, who attempted to commit suicide but saw the light at the end of the tunnel just in time, something most students don't see soon enough. A Yahoo article written by Liz Goodwin entitled "Tulane’s Mental Health Meltdown," interviewed Arora, in which she explained that "at one point, right in the thick of midterms, near the end of her sophomore year, a college administrator told Arora she had to find a therapist within two weeks or leave campus."
Certainly this is not the right way for any college institution to care for its students who are in dire need of aid. Not every case that exceeds beyond the 15 sessions Ramapo College allows per semester is severe enough to seek psychiatric care. Many students find leverage when there is always someone to talk to. This is a way for many students to relieve stress and get on with their lives comfortably for as long as they have some type of "net" to catch them when they fall. Now, you may ask, "Isn't that what parents are for, if not their friends?" The unfortunate truth is many students feel they are unable to connect with their parents, hence the suicides.
The Yahoo article that was referenced before also mentioned, "No college is immune. The problem is growing, and it’s universal." College institutions need to understand what is actually pushing students away rather than helping them and sending them off with a list of psychiatrists that may or may not even be covered by their insurance plan certainly is not the way to go about it.
Don't remove students from school and force them to fend for themselves; they are already feeling hopeless and worthless to begin with. Schools are cutting down on services and service operation times, and there isn't a school that I am aware of that has an actual psychiatrist on hand, because psychiatrists most likely cost the same as paying for two psychologists, which means that more students can be attended to. Even so, what good are the savings if the knowledge and care of a psychologist is not enough to help these students sufficiently? It can't possibly be that schools cannot afford an in-house psychiatrist, at least one on staff. Heck, if Ramapo was able to spend $44,250 on consultations for a campus report on alcohol consumption, the school can certainly pay for more psychologists on board, as well as all other schools who are not up to par with their counseling services.
