here an article about student committed suicide because of their studies.
Following early studies conducted at Oxford and Cambridge (Carpenter,
1959; Parnell, 1951; Rook, 1959; Temby, 1961), many of the U.S. studies were
done at prestigious universities (Atkinson, 1969; Braaten & Darling, 1962;
Bruyn & Seiden, 1965; Eckert, 1966; Halleck, 1967a, 1967b; Paffenbarger &
Asnes, 1966; Parrish, 1957; Seiden, 1966). Almost unanimously, these studies
pointed to elevated suicide rates among students, a finding that was commonly
assumed to be related to intense academic pressure at those schools. With the
notable exception of the studies at Oxford (Parnell, 1951), Cambridge (Carpenter,
1959; Rook, 1959), and Berkeley (Bruyn&Seiden, 1965; Seiden, 1966), the
claim of a higher suicide rate among college students compared to the general
population appears questionable when the reported figures are subjected to statistical
scrutiny (Lipschitz, 1990). Later research also questioned whether the
environment of the elite schools is responsible for students’ suicidal behavior or
whether such schools attract and select students who may be more emotionally
unstable (Berkovitz, 1985; Seiden, 1971). One detailed study of suicidal students
at a prestigious university indicated that although students often related
their mood to their difficulties at school, they were usually having academic difficulties
because they were depressed, not the otherway around (Hendin, 1975a,
1975b).
By the 1980s, there was general awareness of the dramatic rise in youth suicide.
Although there was every reason to believe that college students also were
affected, the research evidence remained equivocal. In a thorough review of the
world’s literature on college student suicide, Lipschitz (1990) described findings
on the incidence of college suicide as highly inconsistent, with estimates of
the suicide rate among college students ranging from 5 to 50 per 100,000. These
results varied so much because studies involved small unrepresentative samples
with wide variation in such factors as geographical location; age range of students;
socioeconomic status (SES), ethnicity, religion, and other family background
characteristics of students; and the social milieu and normative culture
of the college in relation to such things as competition and achievement, drug
and alcohol use, and support structures, some or all of which may have had a
bearing on the reported suicide rate. In light of extensive variation among colleges,
Lipschitz concluded that it was not possible to identify any study that was
truly representative of the national college and university student population.
Furthermore, he noted that inconsistencies in case definitions and methods of
case finding across studies have severely limited comparability of conclusions.
In undertaking the most comprehensive attempt to date to compare the incidence
of suicide among undergraduate and graduate students to a matched
national sample (The Big Ten Student Suicide Study), Silverman and his colleagues
elaborated on the methodological problems inherent in earlier studies
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