https://nypost.com/2022/03/04/...tanford-parents-say/

Are the pressures larger now than when we were growing up? Are the expectations different? Or are students reacting differently?

I find myself struggling to understand. I have vivid recollections of one suicide during my time in college, and we were all devastated (I knew the girl). I've had bad periods, and I knew plenty of others who did too, but I don't recall it ever being considered or even talked about. The downside was either transferring or dropping out. Not killing yourself.

Something is different now, and I don't know what it is.

quote:

Are the pressures larger now than when we were growing up? Are the expectations different? Or are students reacting differently?

Yes.

I guess a bad thing happens, the person is already on edge, they lose perspective.

The suicide I remember most was when I was at the law firm. The new class of recent grads arrived, and this one guy had gone to Harvard or something. He had come from a poor family in Appalachia and was the pride and joy of his town, and he was sending money home. He was doing very good work for a difficult partner at the firm, so it was all coming together for him.

When the bar results came out, his name wasn't listed. That was odd, as he was a bright guy. Flunking isn't great, but you get a second chance, normally. Trouble was, the reason he failed was that he had never graduated from law school. He had failed to turn in his last paper. There was discussion at the firm about what to do with him; because he lied on his bar application and also to the firm about being a law school grad, the firm felt it had no choice but to terminate him. So he hanged himself.

It's been decades, and I still think about how he could have just deferred his start date, written that stupid paper, taken the bar, and still been the pride and joy of the town.

Mary was in the law school class ahead of mine. She had graduated with honors from Loyola. Her handwriting was small and precise and captured every word said by the professors. She had a great future ahead of her. She was an active in producing the Law Review.
There was speculation that she was a lesbian. Good Catholics are not homosexual.
She took a bunch of sleeping pills. No one could recall any indication that she would do that.

Are there more suicides or are we just more likely to be told that they were suicides now because people are more open about mental illness? “Died suddenly” has been used to cover up a lot over the years.

I do think there is more pressure on kids/teens/young adults now than there was in the past. And the “grown ups” have brought a lot of it on by saying things like “anything you do lives forever on the internet”. When you make a mistake and it’s public, it’s a lot harder for kids to think it’s going to go away. It’s a lot harder to have hope if every caring adult in your life has drilled into your head that it’s impossible to erase mistakes.

I also think there is more failure and despair than in the past. Say you want to be a doctor. It is so competitive. Say you want to start a small business. Good luck competing against Amazon.

It's brutal out there.

A few things that are either new, or more intense, than when we geezers were in college and starting out:

1. Massive student debt
2. Future (even without debt) that likely doesn't include home ownership
3. Intensely competitive job market for many higher paying, professional jobs
4. Totally inadequate pay for entry level jobs that aren't STEM or skilled labor
5. Minimum wage that hasn't remotely kept up with inflation (which it did until about 1970)--if it had, it would be in the $25 range now
6. Unrealistic expectations of how your life "should" be, courtesy of social media
7. Easy access to guns and/or addictive drugs
8. Difficulty getting or paying for mental health care, even if you're insured

I think the negative impact of social media on well being and mental health is only starting to be understood and is greatly understated.

Sidebar: federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr, which corresponds to $1,257 a month, BEFORE taxes. Scaled for inflation, at $25/hr you would gross $4,333 per month. A massive difference.

Ok, nevermind - I should have clicked on the link first! That’s what I heard in the interview. So awful that whatever it was made her feel like her life was over.

I think that being a star athlete AND a star academic (which presumably go hand in hand at a place like Stanford) are also unique.

There was another suicide of a star volleyball player at Stanford in 2012. She played alongside her twin sister, which may be another set of pressures. The media, family and university did not want to use "the s word," and I believe that when she passed away the initial quote was that she had died "following an intense battle in ICU." I found the whole thing kind of odd. I felt like the underlying tone was that suicide was for failures and weaklings, but to say she died "battling" was somehow better.

I can imagine a few things worse than losing a child through suicide.

But not many.