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Show Suicide Saves Students From 'Life attempt, the girl said: "I don't know who I really am, what I really want, or where I am going. I think things and worry and when I feel things I can only cry. I can't say yes or no I'm like a puppet." After the incident, her mother "took over." Without manifesting any emotional responses she fired off instructions about covering up and repairing the damages. j Divorce Proceedings 1 The roster of problems suffered by a Cornell senior was revealed during the hospital sessions which followed his slit-wrists suicide attempt. at-tempt. His parents were going j through divorce proceedings after years of an unhappy marriage, and each parent tried to enlist the boy's 1 support against the other. After four years in college he was coming com-ing close to the challenge of starting start-ing a career. These new responsibilities responsi-bilities obviously scared him. His prospective in-laws did not seem to like him. At Fairfield University one member mem-ber of the class of '66 stabbed himself him-self to death. That same year a freshman had to be coaxed from a dorm roof. One student wrecked his room and left. AH were said to be under heavy academic pressures. pres-sures. A coed wrote a personal account of her attempted suicide for the University of Wisconsin Daily Cardinal. Her comments were blunt: (Editor's note.' The following column discusses the stresses and social pressures which seem to be building up in the college students of America, causing them to use any conceivable type of escape device de-vice imaginable. This is the first of two parts, the second to appear next Tuesday.) By J. MARK LONO Collegiate Press Service Joseph C. Didinger was a bright young man married to a beautiful, alert girl. Last December he was busy readying his 45-foot, two-masted two-masted yawl for a proposed sailing venture to the West Indies. Early this January, Joseph Didinger Did-inger was the subject of an official U.S. army statement. "At approximately 9:30 a.m. on January 4, 1966, Joseph Didinger, a pre-inductee from Thornberry Township, Pa., fell from a window of an unoccupied office on the third floor of the armed forces examining ex-amining and entrance station, Boston Bos-ton Army Base. He was referred from pre-induction by Somerville Selective Service Board 22 and was one of 266 pre-inductees undergoing undergo-ing physical examinations." Didinger was 22. He was a hardworking hard-working man with varied interests. He was in the Merchant Marine; he built boats; he was a garage mechanic. me-chanic. And for two years he worked in the rare books section of the University of Pennsylvania library. li-brary. He had been a student at Pennsylvania Penn-sylvania State University but he had stayed there only a year. His father, a Philadelphia architect who himself was graduated from Penn State, explained why: "The place is too big now, much bigger than in my days, and I think my son asked his professors too many questions. He was fascinated by logic and when he was in high school he used to take special evening eve-ning classes in the subject. He was always searching for truth. He asked a lot of questions." though the well known Yale Clinic was established in 1925, only 11 of the 25 were undergoing any kind of professional treatment. A more recent study, "Suicide Tendencies Among College Students," Stu-dents," was conducted at Cornell University by Drs. Leif J. Braaten and C. Douglas Darling. The two men studied 134 students from the general student patient population at Cornell. Some Attempt Suicide They found that 81 of these 134 students had at least occupational thoughts of suicide; 23 of these had frequent thoughts and another 16 actually attempted suicide. Other findings of the study were: There seemed to be a definite trend toward more suicide tendencies tenden-cies among undergraduate students than among students at the graduate gradu-ate level. No general relationship was established between suicide tendencies ten-dencies and sex, nor between suicide sui-cide and marital status. Suicidal tendencies were more often found among the better students. stu-dents. 16 Left Notes Most of the- students who attempted at-tempted suicides did so twice. Only three of the 16 left suicide notes. The methods of attempts, in order of frequency, were: poisonous drugs, motor agitation, jumping off a cliff, shooting, cutting, choking, and car "accident." Dr. W. D. Tempy at Harvard has reported that the rate of completed suicides there is three persons for every 20,000 students. This would indicate that for every actual suicide sui-cide there are at least 50 students who have more or less serious suicidal sui-cidal tendencies which do not end in tragic death. Dr. Dana Farnsworth of the Harvard Har-vard University Health Service estimates that "a suicide can be expected ex-pected somewhat more often than once yearly in a student body of 10,000." The record shows that in 1962, about 550 young people between 1 5 and 19 years old took their own lives. Social Pressure "I was sick of social pressures which said that you must act this way or that so that you will be accepted. I was sick of the feeling that I was accepted for reasons having nothing to do really with me, but from the home or parents I came from. I was sick of the idea that you had to be rich, sleep with everyone, and kiss everyone's fbyal American to be someone. 1 only wanted to be myself but that never seemed to be enough. "My parents hounded me about my grades to the point that I spent more time worrying than I did studying. The idea of failure was the worst thing in the world that could happen. There was no chance to begin over; if you failed trie first time that was it. "My dorm mother was a nor-rible nor-rible woman sweet to your face but stabbing you in the back an the time. I had to go to a neaa shrinker some years before ana she found out about it and that was the end. She wouldn't let me alone. I couldn't do anything ngni even if it were the way I combea my hair. She almost drove me to my grave. By the time exams came I was a nervous wreck. I diani even know as much as my name anymore. . ,,. "I went home right before exams for a weekend. Then it haPP"J; the worst it had ever been. Tfien came the sleeping PllIs D aspirins, and a razor blade. (Continued next issue; Sex & Drugs It is no longer a secret that colleges col-leges have problems with drugs, sex, and thievery. The word is now also getting out that students, many students, have serious emotional problems, and ,that some of them end in suicide. Suicide is the second greatest cause of death among American male college students. A survey of 209 deaths occurring at Yale University Uni-versity between 1920 and 1955 showed that 92 students had died in accidents and 25 had committed . suicide. The belief that only introverts are suicide-prone was dispelled at Yale 10 of the 25 held student offices, six were athletes, and 10 belonged to fraternities. At the time they died, eight were having financial trouble, five had had their marriage proposals refused, re-fused, and one was a practicing but remorseful homosexual. Al- Why Suicide? Why suicide? "Things are tough all over" is the traditional observation obser-vation of the cynic, so why does emotional crisis center on the university? uni-versity? Maybe it doesn't center there at all. Emotional difficulty, and even suicide, is usually a pretty personal person-al thing, and accurate information about its prevalence among different differ-ent social groups may never be available. In the meantime, a disproportionate dis-proportionate amount of the attention at-tention will be focused on the classroom fjshbowl, the researchers habitat. A girl at Stanford who attempted suicide was discovered to suffer under domination from her mother, who selected the girl's friends and her school. In the hospital after her suicide |
