kylen wrote:
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Man, what happened to the good old days of swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills
Oh, she did that too, and cut herself on multiple prior occasions as well. Her parents filed a $27 million wrongful-death lawsuit against MIT claiming that the school knew about her problems and didn't do enough to help her, and it ended up being settled for an undisclosed (presumably high) amount.
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I know the head of the MIT student mental health services. That school surpassed Carnegie Mellon in its incidents of suicide risk. They need those holidays. The head of student services, btw, is one of the best therapists I've ever met.
The holidays don't seem to be doing the trick; I heard that there have been at least 3 suicides at MIT in this academic year alone, a marked increase from previous years. The professors don't lessen total workload because of these "suicide prevention" holidays; instead the students just have a higher concentration of problem sets due on Tuesdays which means more Monday all-nighters.
Christ, that's bad and suicides in a community can often infect others who do the same. Talking and knowing people who live and work at MIT, you realize that genius and madness are more related than you think. Or at least the perfectionism that is usually obligatory to get into a school like that is something akin to insanity.
It's hard to tell what does it. My town (Somerville, MA) had a rash of high school suicides and the demographics aren't that different than surrounding communities (like Medford, for example) that don't have any especially high incidents of suicide, so I imagine that the contagion effect is really powerful. It's like that in families-- people are seen at higher risk if they have had a family member.
But you know, in the end, the biggest trouble is that we in mental health have no reliable measure about the risk of suicide, since other suicidal behaviors doesn't necessarily mean sh*t in terms of those who are actually successful at it. It's the same way with homicide. I remember when my first client committed suicide while i treated him-- there are actually not many cases I've had of that happening but it makes you realize how helpless you really are as a mental health professional to help someone hellbent on annihilation.
Edited, May 22nd 2008 7:28pm by Annabella