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Two suicides in two days...WTF?

S

SLCentral

Diamond Member
So at my university, two undergraduates have killed themselves in the past two days. Another suicide happened a couple months ago as well. Can I get a WTF?
 
It happens a lot. Very regularly. More than 29,000 people back in 1999 alone did it. Nearly 30,000. That's about 80 people a day.
 
he's in Ithica, so I assume Cornell.

That is what the gorges are there for, afterall. Would be a shame to waste them by people not throwing themselves off.
 
SLCentral said:
So at my university, two undergraduates have killed themselves in the past two days. Another suicide happened a couple months ago as well. Can I get a WTF?
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I know! I have a friend who goes there. The gorge should be renamed, Suicide Dive or something.
 
It happens more than people realize. Often the families will keep it quiet so when people read about it things like newspapers it will just say something like passed away on date, at the age of xx without providing a cause.
 
Not unusual at University. University can be both the best time of your life and also one of the most difficult transition periods for many. Suicides are common on campuses. As much as we grow emotionally during high-school University is a big transition and a lot of people hit a brick wall there. I know my anxiety and depression issues grew 100x worse.
 
This gets touched upon in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point:

But it reminds me of the suicide epidemic in Micronesia that I mention in the book. Not too long ago Micronesia was swept by a wave of suicide among teenage boys. This is a part of the world that went from having no problems whatsoever with suicide to having the worst suicide problem in the world, all within a couple of years.

It involved nobody but teenage boys, who would all commit suicide in the same way, under the same circumstances, in exact mimicry of one another. Weirdly, suicide became for those boys the most articulate way of communicating a kind of social shame and frustration, and the act itself became a kind of proxy for language.

The same thing is going on in American schools: these kids are using shootings to say something, and what they're expressing is a complicated set of emotions. Teens always have angst, obviously, but in Micronesia suddenly suicide became the way that the angst was articulated. In this country right now it's school shootings. In both cases, a contagious and sticky idea has taken hold of people.
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