By wpengine November 12, 2003
The issue of suicide on college campuses has been thrust into the national media spotlight following three New York University student suicides this semester. According to the Jed Foundation, a non-profit organization committed to reducing the suicide rate among young adults, approximately seven college students per 100,000 die from suicide each year. The organization projects 1,100 suicides this year among college students. According the U.S. Department of Health, the suicide rate among teens tripled between 1970-1990, rising from 3.6 youths per 100,000 to 11. “Nationwide, you will see colleges and universities prioritizing suicide prevention,” said Sharon Dittman, associate director of community relations at Gannett: Cornell University Health Services. Last April, there were four student deaths at Cornell, although not all were determined to be suicides. “We are doing more and more every year [to prevent suicides],” Dittman said. “We are determined to become atypical [with respect to national averages].” The university has set out to accomplish this goal in a number of ways. For the past six years, after every suicide at Cornell, the Community Support Team Network has met to respond to and assess each situation. “We go out on very short notice and help people talk about their feelings and thoughts and come together as a community,” explained Phil Meilman, director of counseling and psychological services and support team member. “It’s one of the best things we’ve instituted.” It is not yet clear whether the three suicides at NYU were related, but concern over the “copycat” effect of a suicide is omnipresent. “It’s a time when anyone who has had a suicidal thought tends to revisit it,” Meilman said. “It’s a time when people are particularly vulnerable.” This is one of the primary reasons the support team was formed. Support team and suicide prevention foundations nationwide have discovered that the secret to prevention may lie in awareness. According to Kent Hubbell ’67, the Robert W. and Elizabeth C. Staley Dean of Students, “The key is to educate the community when they find a student who they believe is in crisis.” Collaborating with the University Counseling and Advising Network, Cornell has begun programs to help educate community members who are in a position to help, including residential advisors. According to Dittmann, the most important outreach likely comes from peers. “I think that students really need to take care of one another,” Hubbell said. “If someone who you are acquainted with is thinking about suicide and expressing it in various ways, we need to know.” “It’s these personal connections that can make a huge difference,” Dittman added. The reason awareness is so important is that it most often leads to counseling for students who are exhibiting signs of trouble, Dittman said. “If you look at the statistics, it’s a relative minority of people who are in counseling who commit suicide nationwide,” Meilman explained. “People who commit suicide tend not to be in counseling.” According to Meilman, making sure people get help and counseling is a a priority on East Hill. When Cornell students do seek counseling through Gannett’s Counseling and Psychological Services department, each is given a mental health screening to determine suicide risk factors. Once counseling begins, it can act as a protective factor. “Suicidal thinking is not an all-or-nothing proposition,” Meilman added. “It’s usually 51-49 [in the person’s mind]. In order to get someone from suicidal to not suicidal, all we need is a one percent shift. Just a little help at the critical moment can make the difference between life and death.” Recent lawsuits have forced universities to reevaluate the amount of outreach they offer students contemplating suicide. In 2000, MIT student Elizabeth Chin and Ferrum College student Michael Frentzel both committed suicide, after which their parents initiated litigation against each respective university. They alleged that the schools were too concerned with student privacy that they overlooked obvious warning signs that the students were suicidal. While the verdict on the case against MIT is still pending, Ferrum College reached an agreement with the Frentzel family in which they admitted they had failed to recognize key warning signs. Because of the media attention being devoted to these two cases — in addition to the recent NYU suicides — universities nationwide are taking steps to avoid a repeat of these tragedies. Cornell has engaged in meetings with a group of peer institutions. These universities, which met last week in New York to continue discussions, are working closely with the Jed Foundation to help prevent suicides. The foundation was founded by the parents of a University of Arizona student who took his own life. “[These meetings] have been very good because [they] enable us to talk to peer institutions and brainstorm together and look at what’s being done,” Meilman, who attended one of the meetings last Tuesday, said. “You get a cross-pollination of ideas.” “These problems are not unique to Cornell,” Dittman added. “We shouldn’t work from scratch.” Striking the balance between privacy and outreach — a central feature of the MIT and Ferrum College lawsuits — can be a difficult task for universities to accomplish. “Some people feel strongly that [early detection programs] are an invasion of privacy,” Hubbell said. “Especially at Cornell, where we have a great tradition of protecting personal privacy.” Yet, Hubbell continued, “the idea would be to come up with some kind of [early outreach] system that allows students in this kind of community to [help each other].” “Privacy has a very high value, but saving lives has a higher value,” Meilman said. “You can’t protect the former if someone isn’t alive.” Meilman also stressed that the University can notify students’ families that a life-and-death problem exists without necessarily revealing the reasons for that situation — doing so could be exceedingly invasive for the person seeking help. “Most of the time, families are amazingly helpful when it comes to a crisis of life-threatening proportion,” he reiterated. Nearly everyone agrees that suicide prevention programs and efforts could always be improved. “Every time there’s been a suicide in recent memory, we always feel like there’s more we could be doing,” Dittman said. However, she noted that she felt good about the programs that have been implemented as the university has made constant forward progress in suicide prevention. “It’s the evolution of [our efforts] that makes us feel good,” she explained. “It’s fair to say that Cornell is not a place where there are more suicides than other universities, but that doesn’t mean we can’t continue to strive to get better,” Hubbell said. “One suicide is too many.”Archived article by Billy McAleer
By wpengine November 12, 2003
Another international organization has come to Ithaca to do business — but this one is offering its products for free. Freecycle.org, an online movement with over 50 chapters worldwide, opened a chapter in Ithaca on Oct. 28. Its purpose is to provide a network for people to give, rather than throw away, items that work but which they no longer need. Freecycle chapters are Yahoo! Groups, e-mail lists that Yahoo! members can create and join for free. Each participating city has its own chapter and group — all of which can be accessed from www.freecycle.org — so that members get only those offers which are in their area. There are only a few rules: most importantly, anything offered on the Freecycle network must be free. Ithaca’s Freecycle was founded by Angele McQuade, who read about the movement in an article in the Christian Science Monitor. The group has grown to 60 members since its inception less than two weeks ago — McQuade said that she’s not surprised that at least three transactions were made the first week. “I created the Yahoo! Group list because I think Ithacans will appreciate and take advantage of the freecycle concept,” she said. She was unsure at first if she wanted to take on a new project in founding a Freecycle chapter in Ithaca, but her hesitation “lasted only an hour.” She said that she hopes Ithacans, many of whom she said are “both generous and concerned about environmental issues such as waste management,” will welcome a new way to avoid simply discarding their unneeded but still useful items. Jessica Brown, a Freecycle member, said that she had been considering starting a similar program herself when she read about Freecycle in the Ithaca Community Journal. She has already received a food processor through the network. “The best thing about this list is that is reflects the great wealth of resources we have as a community, and it can bring people together,” she said. The Freecycle.org Network was founded by “Downtown Don’t Waste It,” a nonprofit RISE recycling organization based in Tucson, Ariz. Freecycle’s more than 53 chapters can be found across the world, from Honolulu to Delhi, India. According to its website, “nearly 800 people have joined the list since its inception in mid-March 2003.” Deron Beal, a RISE employee, came up with the idea for Freecycle when he kept receiving working items to recycle from various sources. He decided to set up an e-mail list for the transactions instead of having to spend much of his time calling various non-profits to take the items. “[I thought that] if I [gave] this a nifty name and opened it to everyone, maybe it would work,” Beal said. It worked so well, in fact, that Beal put up instructions on how to start local Freecycle chapters on his website. “My dream, really, is to set up a … really cool web page where everyone can have [a website for] their group right on the webpage,” Beal said. This new site would also host the [e-mail lists], making it possible to become independent of Yahoo!. McQuade said that most of Ithaca Freecycle’s publicity so far has been through word of mouth, although she has prepared fliers and handouts which members can download and post. She expects membership to grow steadily as word gets out — the group will become more useful as more members join. McQuade also mentioned that college students would particularly benefit from Freecycle. “‘Freecycling’ is perfect for college students, both those who need a particular item but can’t afford it as well as those who have useful things they no longer want and who would like to see go to a new home instead of into the trash,” she said. Archived article by Yuval Shavit