Study: suicide rate at MIT is higher than at other schools - News: noteworthy people, programs, funding, and technological advances in the world of higher education - Brief Article

Matrix: The Magazine for Leaders in Education, April, 2001 by Al Branch

Since 1990, 11 Massachusetts Institute of Technology students have committed suicide, an "alarming" number for a university of its size, say health experts and students at the prestigious school.

In fact, many at the school feel the high suicide rate, an average of about one per year, calls into question the adequacy of MIT's mental health services, according to The Boston Globe. Of the 11 suicides, 10 were undergraduates. The school's annual undergraduate enrollment is about 4,400 students, but the total enrollment is about 9,800 students.

According to the Globe study, MIT students were more likely to kill themselves during the 1990s, compared to students at 11 other universities with science and engineering programs. MIT's suicide rate during the period was 38 percent higher than at Harvard, which had the second highest rate. Not all the schools contacted by the Globe, including Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon, and Yale, agreed to submit data on the subject, or had specific data on the matter.

On a scale of deaths per 100,000 since 1990, MIT had a rate of 10.2, compared to Harvard's rate of 7.4, and Johns Hopkins, the third place school, with 6.9, according to the study.

Compared to the national average for 17- to 22-year-olds in the United States, MIT's suicide rate is also higher at 20.6 per 100,000 since 1990. The national average during the period was 13.5, according to the study, and at all colleges, an estimated 7 per 100,000 commit suicide.

According to several MIT students a culture of suicide has festered on campus, the Globe says, and while counseling cases have risen by 60 percent since 1995, the staff has not been increased.

"People have been killing themselves at what I consider an alarming rate," Eric Plosky, a recent MIT graduate who helped create a task force to look at the school's mental health situation, told the Globe.

"It appears there's a culture at MIT that has reinforced suicide and jumping as a means of escaping," Madelyn Gould, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, told the Globe of the MIT situation. An expert on suicide and contagion, she added that the pattern appears to show a "suicide contagion" at the school, with victim begetting victim in the same small community.

MIT President Charles M. Vest, disagreed with Gould's theory. "I do not believe for a minute that students actually consider this a casual matter" he told the Globe in a prepared statement.

"Neither the care for their fellow students I observe, nor the shattering sadness, guilt, reaching out to families or searching for answers that result from such tragedies, suggest casualness," Vest added.