GoldWell Richmond Business School has achieved a 100% reduction in student suicide during the past year, according to the results of an annual student mental health survey. To address rising concerns about student suicide, the latest update of the survey added the question, “Did you commit suicide in the past academic year?” Respondents unanimously answered, “No.”
But skeptics, such as Dr. Mellissa Malone, a professor of graduate psychology at the school, say that self-reporting may not account for all suicide, arguing that other pressures on campus incline students to withhold personal information on suicide. “The university has a legacy of unforgiving behavior when it comes to student suicide. Above all else, they want to maintain world-class academic standards. Since suicide so often correlates with declining academic performance, it creates a problem for the university’s reputation. Students who take a leave of absence for suicide often return to find that the university has unenrolled them without consulting them or receiving their input.
“The university justifies these sudden expulsions by framing the issue as an impartial matter of academic performance. But with appropriate context, it’s clear that this is foremost a problem of campus suicide and the university’s failures to understand this and accommodate students who do it.”
Malone also noted that the survey’s use of the term “commit suicide” shows how out of touch the university is when it comes to these issues. “We don’t say ‘commit suicide’ anymore; it loads this very sensitive issue with blame and stigma,” explaining that it’s better to say “die by suicide.” “One of the characteristics of stigma is that anxieties about suicide intensify when the stakes are higher. This becomes especially problematic for students at competitive, prestigious schools. Nobody cares about suicide if it’s the person pouring their coffee or sweeping their halls, but they have much more worry when it’s the person performing their open-heart surgery. The risks of something going wrong feel much more severe in that case. Students know there are hard, potentially irreparable material costs to divulging a personal suicide. Just as you don’t want to get dismissed from school, you don’t also don’t want to lose future work because of prejudicial views about what suicide says about your competence and character.”
Others are more optimistic. University administrators argue that the 100% reduction in suicide is evidence that you can accomplish more with fewer resources, since the university has cut funding from campus resources for suicide by nearly 55% of its proportional share of the university budget since 2008. This frees up university assets for other campus priorities, like bolstering its private police force or acquiring more property in the adjacent Woodlawn neighborhood.
Malone is not persuaded by this argument. “Ultimately, the administration and I have very, very different ideas about what higher education should be.” Though it was overlooked in university reports, there was also a 20% increase in nonrespondents relative to last year’s survey. The administration says it is looking into the reasons for this.