Medicine: Suicidal Students

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Good grades, Psychologist Leif J. Braaten and Psychiatrist C. Douglas Darling told the American Psychological Association, are not merely the sign of a successful student. The man who gets high marks, the Cornell University researchers said, is also the man most likely to attempt suicide.

The investigators did not claim that all bright students are suicidal; but after a study of Cornell students suffering from serious emotional problems, they were convinced that "patients with suicidal tendencies were, as a group, good, or very good students." Nonsuicidal students, they learned, "were doing more poorly in their academic work." The statistics of their study showed no significant relationship between the urge to self-destruction and sex, marital status, nationality or religion. Bright students who felt they had academic difficulties simply "measured themselves according to their own standards, which were higher than those of the university." Anytime a student confesses to thoughts of suicide, said Drs. Braaten and Darling, university health officials should be alert for trouble. "Even a student who is intellectualizing about suicide should be carefully assessed." His motives, the researchers reported, are likely to be: 1) a desire to "destroy himself because he can no longer tolerate the discrepancy between how he appears to himself and how he would like to be," 2) a need "to punish the other person who has been so frustrating and has brought him so much hurt," 3) an urge to repent for some sin, and 4) a cry for help—"Please rescue me, don't leave me alone." The best that a college can do for such disturbed students, said Braaten and Darling, is to give them a medical leave of absence for treatment away from the campus, "where at least the psychological pressures of college are removed."