Worried Colleges Step Up Efforts Over Suicide - {toxins & profits}

[Guest guest]

" Increasingly, college officials and mental health experts have come to

realize that many of the most vulnerable students - the ones prone to

self-injury and suicide - are like Ms. : they never go near the

counseling centers or reveal anything about their experience before

college. As a result, colleges are stepping up efforts to find them and

to get them into treatment, sometimes forcing them to leave temporarily. "

{In a way, college's determination sounds beneficial, but the underlying

dynamic is that neurologic injuries from environmental and iatrogenic

toxins is causing a larger number of kids to have problems that require

medication. Too many policies allow, even encourage toxin exposure.

Mandatory screening and mandatory prescriptions become yet another tool

for sustaining and expanding pharm sales and pharmco-investor profits.

Autism is one facet of a huge iceberg. - }

Worried Colleges Step Up Efforts Over Suicide

By KAREN W. ARENSON

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/03/politics/03drug.html

had been at Columbia University for only a few weeks

when she went out drinking with a group of friends downtown last year

and became separated from them. She had skipped her medication for

bipolar disorder. Now it was 3 a.m. and, crying and in a panic, she

called friends; she told them, she said, that she " just wished the

traffic would take me out. "

Although she made it back to campus safely, her friends had already

notified Columbia that they were worried about her. For Columbia

officials, it was the first clue that Ms. faced any kind of

mental health problems.

" I wasn't on Columbia's radar at all, " said Ms. , who is back on

campus now after being forced to take a medical leave.

Increasingly, college officials and mental health experts have come to

realize that many of the most vulnerable students - the ones prone to

self-injury and suicide - are like Ms. : they never go near the

counseling centers or reveal anything about their experience before

college. As a result, colleges are stepping up efforts to find them and

to get them into treatment, sometimes forcing them to leave temporarily.

The goal is to help students like Ms. . But colleges have more

at stake. Suicide - the second-biggest cause of death among college

students - can be costly, injuring reputations and prompting litigation.

The suicide of a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

Shin, in 2000, and strings of suicides at New York University,

Washington University and the University of Illinois, have drawn

wide attention. There has also been a rise in lawsuits involving student

suicides.

Ann H. e, a vice president of United Educators, a company that

insures 1,200 universities, colleges and schools, said suicide

prevention had risen in priority as claims had risen; her company, Ms.

e said, now has a " handful " of claims, up from none six years ago.

" They can be very severe claims financially, " Ms. e said, " not to

mention the emotional and reputational impact they can have on a school. "

In a closely watched case, the family of Shin has sued M.I.T.

for $27 million.

One study of suicides on college campuses, based on a dozen universities

in the 1980's, found a rate of about 7.5 per 100,000 students, which is

about half the rate for young adults not in college and represents about

1,100 suicides a year for the entire college population. Although there

have not been comparable studies since then, most mental health experts

say they believe the rate has remained at about that level.

To address the problem, Emory University and the University of North

Carolina are inviting students to fill out anonymous mental health

questionnaires. Duke University is asking faculty members to be alert to

changes in behavior - noticing, for example, when a student suddenly

becomes sullen or quiet, or stays away from class. Columbia, New York

University and Cornell now place counselors in residence halls. The

University of Illinois and the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma,

Wash., are requiring any student who threatens or attempts suicide to

attend counseling sessions.

But the best way to reach these students remains unclear, and students

do not always welcome the intervention. Some experts fear that forcing

students to enter treatment or to take a medical leave can dissuade

others from asking for help and discourage their friends from sounding

the alarm, even though students who take such leaves generally come back

and graduate.

The recent forced withdrawal of a freshman at N.Y.U. was front-page news

in the student newspaper, Washington Square News. The student, Sue

Schaller, told the paper that although she had been briefly hospitalized

for depression and suicidal thoughts, she felt much better when she

returned to campus and wanted to stay in school, but that the university

would not let her.

An editorial in the newspaper called for the university to " do

everything it can, including requiring therapy and regular check-ins, to

ensure that troubled students who wish to remain on campus can stay and

that they pose as little risk as possible, " adding, " Pushing those

students out of the university community is not the answer. "

In retrospect, Ms. , the Columbia student, said she had mixed

feelings about how the university treated her. She said she still felt

wounded by the process - she called it a " charade " - that ejected her

from school.

Even with things going smoothly, Ms. , whose dark hair is tinted

purple and who speaks with energy and humor, said her mind sometimes

wandered to what she missed last year, while she was on leave, and to

the possibility of running into new trouble.

" I am so scared about screwing up, " she said, " and of being sent home

again. "

Columbia officials declined to comment on Ms. 's case. They said

that the university did not keep statistics on how many students were

forced to go home, but that there were few of them.

For years, colleges and universities have been grappling with a growing

flood of students with histories of mental illness. Most have expanded

the number of counselors and the hours they are available.

But now they are going further. Some are turning to the Internet as a

way to bring troubled students in for help. The American Foundation for

Suicide Prevention has developed an anonymous online mental health

questionnaire and a program to steer troubled students to counseling,

which is being tested at Emory and the University of North Carolina.

Those involved say the initial results seem promising.

At Emory, which started using the program in 2002, only 8 percent of the

students who received the survey filled it out, but 85 percent of those

students were deemed at moderate or high risk of suicide or other severe

problems based on their responses to the questionnaire. They are

encouraged to speak to a counselor on or off campus, or to consult

anonymously with a counselor online.

" The yield is relatively small, " said Ann Haas, research director for

the suicide-prevention foundation. " However, we are absolutely convinced

that those kids would not have gotten into treatment. We think we are

reaching the right kids. "

Many campuses, including Duke and M.I.T., are asking faculty and staff

members and students to tell a dean or the counseling office if they see

students who show signs of depression or potential suicide.

At Duke, when faculty members or parents relay concerns about students

to Larry Moneta, the vice president for student affairs, he and members

of the residence hall staff check up on the students, sometimes

surreptitiously.

" Many times I've called the residence hall staff and asked if they can

dispatch a paraprofessional to inadvertently drop by a student's room as

if it were a casual encounter, " Dr. Moneta said. " I do that all the time. "

After Ms. Shin's suicide, M.I.T. began running training sessions for

faculty members, departmental administrators, athletic coaches,

dormitory personnel, fraternities and sororities to help them spot

people showing signs of problems - one of several steps recommended by a

mental health task force created after the suicide.

Cornell is making a special effort to reach out to Asian and

Asian-American students. Of 16 students there who have committed suicide

since 1996, 9 were of Asian descent. The university created a task force

to explore those students' experience at Cornell and how to help them

when they have problems, since they do not use Cornell's counseling

services at the same rate as their classmates, said H. , the

university's vice president for student and academic services. Often

when they do seek help, " they are in real crisis, " Ms. said.

Colleges are also leaning more heavily on students who show suicidal

tendencies to enter counseling. Several are examining or adopting a

program developed by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,

requiring any student who threatens or attempts suicide to attend at

least four counseling sessions.

Joffe, the program's director, said the results had been good: all

but one of nearly 2,000 students in the program over 20 years remained

at the university during the counseling sessions, and none committed

suicide. And although the university has had suicides among students not

in the program - including six in the last academic year - it says its

suicide rate is about half of what it was before the program started.

While some college officials question whether students should be forced

into counseling, others favor the heavy-handed approach. The University

of Puget Sound, one of the campuses that recently began using the

Illinois approach, bluntly describes the program as " a public statement

that suicide is unacceptable here. "

" We don't know what it is about that model that is so effective, " said

Donn Marshall, director of counseling, health and wellness services at

Puget Sound. " Is it that somebody stands up and says suicide is

unacceptable? Or is it that somebody says, 'I care'? Or is it something

about what happens in the four sessions with a psychologist? "

When Ms. arrived at Columbia last year from Nashville, she had

been struggling with bipolar disorder and problems with drinking and

drugs, and she had a cabinetful of medications. She had planned to

contact the counseling service to find someone to talk to, but three

weeks into the school year, she had not gotten around to it. She said

she had arrived confident she could succeed.

" There was a big to-do before I went to school to ask my doctors if I

was ready, " she said. " They all said yes. " What most put her off about

the way Columbia handled her case, she said, was the quick interview

with a university psychologist that she thought was intended to figure

out what she needed to do to stay at school, but that she later learned

was to decide whether she should be allowed to remain.

She said she had been totally candid in talking to him, because " I've

talked to a lot of psychologists, and realized that if you tried to

butter them up, you don't get the help you need. "

But she said she did not believe the university had been equally candid.

" He worked for the school, not the patient, " she said. " If they don't

tell you that, you lose trust. The kids they are dealing with are smart

enough to understand the dynamic after the fact. "

Margo D. Amgott, assistant vice president for health services at

Columbia, said the university tried to make sure students understood

that the interview was for the university's evaluation purposes and even

required that they sign a document saying they understood.

Ms. said that while she did indeed signed papers, she had had

no choice, and thought that the decision to stay or leave would still be

up to her and her family. But when she and her father talked about

lining up support for her in New York, they learned that it was not

their call, and she was given four days to move out of her room.

Being sent home to Nashville just three weeks into her freshman year

made her feel worse rather than better, she said, and she ended up in a

psychiatric hospital.

She said that now that she was back at Columbia, she was doing well. She

is majoring in anthropology and has a late-night radio program, " Zombies

vs. Ballerinas, " that features groups like Mogwai.

And while she is in regular touch with a college adviser assigned to

her, she has not sought psychological help, either at Columbia or outside.

" Last year's treatment was so expensive that it has driven my father

into debt, " Ms. said. " It makes me feel guilty. "

*

The material in this post is distributed without profit to those

who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included

information for research and educational purposes.

For more information go to:

http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html

<http://oregon.uoregon.edu/%7Ecsundt/documents.htm>

http://oregon.uoregon.edu/~csundt/documents.htm

<http://oregon.uoregon.edu/%7Ecsundt/documents.htm>

If you wish to use copyrighted material from this email for

purposes that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission

from the copyright owner.

[Guest guest]

T,

This is why it's so important to have a council program available as part of the

regular curriculum is both high schools and colleges. Not only does ongoing

council help to identify kids that are struggling or on the brink, but it's

excellent preventative medicine.

jack

Binstock wrote:

" Increasingly, college officials and mental health experts have come to

realize that many of the most vulnerable students - the ones prone to

self-injury and suicide - are like Ms. : they never go near the

counseling centers or reveal anything about their experience before

college. As a result, colleges are stepping up efforts to find them and

to get them into treatment, sometimes forcing them to leave temporarily. "

{In a way, college's determination sounds beneficial, but the underlying

dynamic is that neurologic injuries from environmental and iatrogenic

toxins is causing a larger number of kids to have problems that require

medication. Too many policies allow, even encourage toxin exposure.

Mandatory screening and mandatory prescriptions become yet another tool

for sustaining and expanding pharm sales and pharmco-investor profits.

Autism is one facet of a huge iceberg. - }

Worried Colleges Step Up Efforts Over Suicide

By KAREN W. ARENSON

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/03/politics/03drug.html

had been at Columbia University for only a few weeks

when she went out drinking with a group of friends downtown last year

and became separated from them. She had skipped her medication for

bipolar disorder. Now it was 3 a.m. and, crying and in a panic, she

called friends; she told them, she said, that she " just wished the

traffic would take me out. "

Although she made it back to campus safely, her friends had already

notified Columbia that they were worried about her. For Columbia

officials, it was the first clue that Ms. faced any kind of

mental health problems.

" I wasn't on Columbia's radar at all, " said Ms. , who is back on

campus now after being forced to take a medical leave.

Increasingly, college officials and mental health experts have come to

realize that many of the most vulnerable students - the ones prone to

self-injury and suicide - are like Ms. : they never go near the

counseling centers or reveal anything about their experience before

college. As a result, colleges are stepping up efforts to find them and

to get them into treatment, sometimes forcing them to leave temporarily.

The goal is to help students like Ms. . But colleges have more

at stake. Suicide - the second-biggest cause of death among college

students - can be costly, injuring reputations and prompting litigation.

The suicide of a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

Shin, in 2000, and strings of suicides at New York University,

Washington University and the University of Illinois, have drawn

wide attention. There has also been a rise in lawsuits involving student

suicides.

Ann H. e, a vice president of United Educators, a company that

insures 1,200 universities, colleges and schools, said suicide

prevention had risen in priority as claims had risen; her company, Ms.

e said, now has a " handful " of claims, up from none six years ago.

" They can be very severe claims financially, " Ms. e said, " not to

mention the emotional and reputational impact they can have on a school. "

In a closely watched case, the family of Shin has sued M.I.T.

for $27 million.

One study of suicides on college campuses, based on a dozen universities

in the 1980's, found a rate of about 7.5 per 100,000 students, which is

about half the rate for young adults not in college and represents about

1,100 suicides a year for the entire college population. Although there

have not been comparable studies since then, most mental health experts

say they believe the rate has remained at about that level.

To address the problem, Emory University and the University of North

Carolina are inviting students to fill out anonymous mental health

questionnaires. Duke University is asking faculty members to be alert to

changes in behavior - noticing, for example, when a student suddenly

becomes sullen or quiet, or stays away from class. Columbia, New York

University and Cornell now place counselors in residence halls. The

University of Illinois and the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma,

Wash., are requiring any student who threatens or attempts suicide to

attend counseling sessions.

But the best way to reach these students remains unclear, and students

do not always welcome the intervention. Some experts fear that forcing

students to enter treatment or to take a medical leave can dissuade

others from asking for help and discourage their friends from sounding

the alarm, even though students who take such leaves generally come back

and graduate.

The recent forced withdrawal of a freshman at N.Y.U. was front-page news

in the student newspaper, Washington Square News. The student, Sue

Schaller, told the paper that although she had been briefly hospitalized

for depression and suicidal thoughts, she felt much better when she

returned to campus and wanted to stay in school, but that the university

would not let her.

An editorial in the newspaper called for the university to " do

everything it can, including requiring therapy and regular check-ins, to

ensure that troubled students who wish to remain on campus can stay and

that they pose as little risk as possible, " adding, " Pushing those

students out of the university community is not the answer. "

In retrospect, Ms. , the Columbia student, said she had mixed

feelings about how the university treated her. She said she still felt

wounded by the process - she called it a " charade " - that ejected her

from school.

Even with things going smoothly, Ms. , whose dark hair is tinted

purple and who speaks with energy and humor, said her mind sometimes

wandered to what she missed last year, while she was on leave, and to

the possibility of running into new trouble.

" I am so scared about screwing up, " she said, " and of being sent home

again. "

Columbia officials declined to comment on Ms. 's case. They said

that the university did not keep statistics on how many students were

forced to go home, but that there were few of them.

For years, colleges and universities have been grappling with a growing

flood of students with histories of mental illness. Most have expanded

the number of counselors and the hours they are available.

But now they are going further. Some are turning to the Internet as a

way to bring troubled students in for help. The American Foundation for

Suicide Prevention has developed an anonymous online mental health

questionnaire and a program to steer troubled students to counseling,

which is being tested at Emory and the University of North Carolina.

Those involved say the initial results seem promising.

At Emory, which started using the program in 2002, only 8 percent of the

students who received the survey filled it out, but 85 percent of those

students were deemed at moderate or high risk of suicide or other severe

problems based on their responses to the questionnaire. They are

encouraged to speak to a counselor on or off campus, or to consult

anonymously with a counselor online.

" The yield is relatively small, " said Ann Haas, research director for

the suicide-prevention foundation. " However, we are absolutely convinced

that those kids would not have gotten into treatment. We think we are

reaching the right kids. "

Many campuses, including Duke and M.I.T., are asking faculty and staff

members and students to tell a dean or the counseling office if they see

students who show signs of depression or potential suicide.

At Duke, when faculty members or parents relay concerns about students

to Larry Moneta, the vice president for student affairs, he and members

of the residence hall staff check up on the students, sometimes

surreptitiously.

" Many times I've called the residence hall staff and asked if they can

dispatch a paraprofessional to inadvertently drop by a student's room as

if it were a casual encounter, " Dr. Moneta said. " I do that all the time. "

After Ms. Shin's suicide, M.I.T. began running training sessions for

faculty members, departmental administrators, athletic coaches,

dormitory personnel, fraternities and sororities to help them spot

people showing signs of problems - one of several steps recommended by a

mental health task force created after the suicide.

Cornell is making a special effort to reach out to Asian and

Asian-American students. Of 16 students there who have committed suicide

since 1996, 9 were of Asian descent. The university created a task force

to explore those students' experience at Cornell and how to help them

when they have problems, since they do not use Cornell's counseling

services at the same rate as their classmates, said H. , the

university's vice president for student and academic services. Often

when they do seek help, " they are in real crisis, " Ms. said.

Colleges are also leaning more heavily on students who show suicidal

tendencies to enter counseling. Several are examining or adopting a

program developed by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,

requiring any student who threatens or attempts suicide to attend at

least four counseling sessions.

Joffe, the program's director, said the results had been good: all

but one of nearly 2,000 students in the program over 20 years remained

at the university during the counseling sessions, and none committed

suicide. And although the university has had suicides among students not

in the program - including six in the last academic year - it says its

suicide rate is about half of what it was before the program started.

While some college officials question whether students should be forced

into counseling, others favor the heavy-handed approach. The University

of Puget Sound, one of the campuses that recently began using the

Illinois approach, bluntly describes the program as " a public statement

that suicide is unacceptable here. "

" We don't know what it is about that model that is so effective, " said

Donn Marshall, director of counseling, health and wellness services at

Puget Sound. " Is it that somebody stands up and says suicide is

unacceptable? Or is it that somebody says, 'I care'? Or is it something

about what happens in the four sessions with a psychologist? "

When Ms. arrived at Columbia last year from Nashville, she had

been struggling with bipolar disorder and problems with drinking and

drugs, and she had a cabinetful of medications. She had planned to

contact the counseling service to find someone to talk to, but three

weeks into the school year, she had not gotten around to it. She said

she had arrived confident she could succeed.

" There was a big to-do before I went to school to ask my doctors if I

was ready, " she said. " They all said yes. " What most put her off about

the way Columbia handled her case, she said, was the quick interview

with a university psychologist that she thought was intended to figure

out what she needed to do to stay at school, but that she later learned

was to decide whether she should be allowed to remain.

She said she had been totally candid in talking to him, because " I've

talked to a lot of psychologists, and realized that if you tried to

butter them up, you don't get the help you need. "

But she said she did not believe the university had been equally candid.

" He worked for the school, not the patient, " she said. " If they don't

tell you that, you lose trust. The kids they are dealing with are smart

enough to understand the dynamic after the fact. "

Margo D. Amgott, assistant vice president for health services at

Columbia, said the university tried to make sure students understood

that the interview was for the university's evaluation purposes and even

required that they sign a document saying they understood.

Ms. said that while she did indeed signed papers, she had had

no choice, and thought that the decision to stay or leave would still be

up to her and her family. But when she and her father talked about

lining up support for her in New York, they learned that it was not

their call, and she was given four days to move out of her room.

Being sent home to Nashville just three weeks into her freshman year

made her feel worse rather than better, she said, and she ended up in a

psychiatric hospital.

She said that now that she was back at Columbia, she was doing well. She

is majoring in anthropology and has a late-night radio program, " Zombies

vs. Ballerinas, " that features groups like Mogwai.

And while she is in regular touch with a college adviser assigned to

her, she has not sought psychological help, either at Columbia or outside.

" Last year's treatment was so expensive that it has driven my father

into debt, " Ms. said. " It makes me feel guilty. "

*

The material in this post is distributed without profit to those

who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included

information for research and educational purposes.

For more information go to:

http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html

<http://oregon.uoregon.edu/%7Ecsundt/documents.htm>

http://oregon.uoregon.edu/~csundt/documents.htm

<http://oregon.uoregon.edu/%7Ecsundt/documents.htm>

If you wish to use copyrighted material from this email for

purposes that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission

from the copyright owner.

Many frequently asked questions and answers can be found at

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