Panel on Campus Suicide Calls for More Prevention

In light of increased focus on campus violence, experts from different disciplines convened at the Columbia Law School on Friday to discuss “Violence on Campus: Prediction, Prevention, and Response.”

The conference called into question the effectiveness of current systems universities use to prevent and cope with violence. Speakers—including legal experts, psychologists, and medical consultants—tackled topics such as prediction and prevention of violence, understanding campus suicides, campus violence in the media, and legal issues.

“These behaviors—and they are behaviors—homicide and suicide, are leading causes of death in young adults,” Morton Silverman said in a panel entitled “Turning Violence Inward—Understanding and Preventing Campus Suicide.” Silverman is the senior medical consultant for the Jed Foundation and clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Chicago.

Columbia’s Program in Health, Law and Society, which organized the conference, is a Law School-based program that spans faculty and students from the Mailman School of Public Health, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the College of Physicians and Surgeons. According to a handout, the program hopes to “enhance the teaching of law, ethics, and social science as they relate to health in the various schools of the university.”

Silverman showed statistics that ranked suicide the third-leading cause of death for 20- to 24-year-olds—the average age of college students—in the U.S. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for 25- to 30-year-olds, the age of most graduate students.

Silverman estimated that there are about 1,300 suicides on college campuses annually, which translates into three suicides a day. Surveys showed that most students said they have felt “very sad” in 2006. In the same study, half of students reported feeling depressed. Many reported that they had stress-related problems that affected their well-being.

“So why don’t students in need seek help?” Silverman asked. To answer, he pointed to a study in which over 25 percent of depressed young adults decided not to accept the diagnosis of depression, “mainly due to negative beliefs, to stigma, and the feeling that being stigmatized would have negative consequences.”

For prevention, Silverman suggested increasing resources and improving the quality of counseling centers, including better supervision of at-risk individuals, media training, sustainable programming, and cross-institutional mental health task forces. Silverman added that a less hostile approach towards dealing with vulnerable students would be helpful, and suggested decreasing academic stress for
at-risk students.

joy.resmovits@columbiaspectator.com