Suicidal Behavior among College Students

RECENT YEARS much attention has been focused on the suicidal college student.With the increasing visibility of campus behavior, behavioral scientists and the mass media have become in- creasingly interested in almost all aspects of college life other than classroom activity.Suicidal deaths attract interest because they seem to occur sud- denly, apparently without explanation, in a youth- ful population that seems to have much to live for.Suicide is estimated to be the second leading cause of death among college students (1. 2).Concern with suicidal behavior among college students has led to two major foci in research efforts.One group of studies dealt with suicide rates among students versus those among nonstudents of the same age group.Temby at Harvard (3), Braaten and Darling at Cornell (4), and, miore recently, Bruyn and Seiden at Berkeley (5, 6) concluded that the suicide rate was considerably higher among stu- dents than among nonstudents of the same age.An earlier study by Parnell at Oxford University in England (7) concluded that the suicide rate for Oxford students was considerably higher than for nonstudents.A common factor in these studies was that they were conducted at large, prominent Amer-