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Suicide on Campus and the Pressure of Perfection

nytimes.com

21–29 of 29 posts

Re: Suicide on Campus and the Pressure of Perfection

#21

At Stanford, this is known as the "duck syndrome." Ducks appear to glide easily on the water, but beneath the surface they are paddling like mad. In a similar way, students may appear to be happy and content when chatting with them in person, but are actually dealing with larger issues that they don't show.

That's in the article:

> While the appellation is unique to Penn, the behavior is not. In 2003, Duke jolted academe with a report describing how its female students felt pressure to be “effortlessly perfect”: smart, accomplished, fit, beautiful and popular, all without visible effort. At Stanford, it’s called the Duck Syndrome. A duck appears to glide calmly across the water, while beneath the surface it frantically, relentlessly paddles.

Re: Suicide on Campus and the Pressure of Perfection

#22
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here in Silicon Valley, there are now suicide-watch guards at the three railroad crossings near Palo Alto's Paly and Gunn high schools. Infrared cameras are being installed.[3] Doesn't that seem a bit short-sided to assume that people will only attempt suicide at railroad crossings and nowhere else along the rail line?

Fences. Now, 8 foot fences with anti-climbing devices on top.

Oh, heh if they have a fence covering all the rail that seems more realistic.

I live in the Ohio and never saw anything like that, so was a bit puzzled how they thought guarding the crossing alone would help.

Re: Suicide on Campus and the Pressure of Perfection

#23
post #13
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Madison judged her social life as inferior to what she saw in the online posts of her high school friends. I'm 32 and still feel shitty about life compared against everybody else posting their amazingly perfect success-success-success lives online. Computers used to be the domain of nerds, then they became too common and now it's a permanent social status ranking high school game you never get to exit and can't even…

How can one not completely opt out? I'm completely opted out of it all. All I've got left is a facebook profile I haven't updated in over 5 years.

I mostly opted out. I became much happier when I stopped looking at other people's feeds & instead only email/text to keep in contact.

Re: Suicide on Campus and the Pressure of Perfection

#24
post #20

We need to talk about suicide but articles like this possibly raise risk. The detailed description of a person and her reasons; mention of methods; mention of locations; etc all are possibly harmful. That leading photo is of an exhibition that IMO would significantly increase risk. The author makes no mention of gender differences in rates of completed suicide (far more common in males). (And it's not just a differen…

Case in point: "The Complete Manual of Suicide" (Kanzen Jisatsu Manual -- 完全自殺マニュアル) which many people in Japan have used to great effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complete_Manual_of_Suicide

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2059673.Kanzen_Jisatsu_Ma...

Re: Suicide on Campus and the Pressure of Perfection

#25
post #8

ESPN did an amazing longform article about the track star mentioned in the OP, Madison Holleran: http://espn.go.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/12833146/instagra... One of the themes of that story, as in the OP, is how social media distorts the reality of experience, making people think that everything is exciting and upbeat in others' lives...I think for better or worse, this effect is stronger in Instagram, and not jus…

While social media has made it worse, we shouldn't place blame on it entirely, or perhaps even heavily.

One of my study mates from freshman year in college committed suicide down the hall from me during orientation week our sophomore year, presumably due to the dissonance between her pressure to perform and her peers' glee of being back on campus.

http://dailyprincetonian.com/news/2004/09/sophomore-found-de...

Re: Suicide on Campus and the Pressure of Perfection

#26
Those years can be hard, with or without social media, etc. My wife knew in college a number of young women who committed suicide over men; this was well before even email was generally available. For that matter, about 90 years ago a college president wrote that a wave of suicides among college men was due to "too much Mencken", causing a memorable reply from H.L. Mencken.

Re: Suicide on Campus and the Pressure of Perfection

#27
post #10
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programmers have passion but journalists have agendas!

Programmers don't have the same ability to influence many people with their work.

Oh, but they do. What algorithm organises your Facebook feed? What content does it prioritise?

Re: Suicide on Campus and the Pressure of Perfection

#28
post #8

ESPN did an amazing longform article about the track star mentioned in the OP, Madison Holleran: http://espn.go.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/12833146/instagra... One of the themes of that story, as in the OP, is how social media distorts the reality of experience, making people think that everything is exciting and upbeat in others' lives...I think for better or worse, this effect is stronger in Instagram, and not jus…

I came across this one a while back: "How many takes did you do before you posted the #nomakeupselfie that you were proud of showing to the world? I can't believe you just scrubbed your make-up off, took a photo, and published it within 10 seconds. Did you?"[1] In the poll results, 23% said "at least 3 times" and 44% said they lost count. The "ideal" life that everyone is portraying is a joke and a fraud to make them…

Most social apps (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat) thrive off of narcissism and the need for validation. Its a terribly large social experiment in progress.

Re: Suicide on Campus and the Pressure of Perfection

#29
I'm not a fan of this trend of presuming causes for suicides. The brain is an incredibly complex system with many failure modes, and some of them are just weird. You don't necessarily posses the hardware to begin to comprehend what a particular suicide victim experienced, which is not to say you shouldn't try, but humility is appropriate.

People project their pet social critiques onto the youth suicide rate. I've heard everything from high-stakes testing to too much Instagram to the rise of atheism to too little punishment. In the context of statistics this might be an appropriate national conversation. In the context of a specific person, speculation on a cause beyond what they've written is patronizing at best.

The only generalization I'm willing to make about a suicide is that the subjective experience of being inside the person's head was excruciatingly painful for too long. This kind of pain is probably not a scalar quantity across individuals, so ideas of normal and abnormal tolerance for it may not even make sense. Perception of time is also subjective, so don't think you can judge "too long" either. There is probably a 16-year-old who has struggled for 3 years with an experience that would have killed you in a week, just as someone has probably killed themselves to escape pain you would have considered trivial.

There may not be a truthy-sounding causal story for the origin of that pain, even for its victim. If they had one, even wrote it down, it might have been an explanation they latched on to but not the root cause, which may be as complex as the sum total of a lifetime of experiences or as banal as chemistry.

I hope that we as a culture can show some respect for the dead and the complexity of their experiences, and stop using them as soapboxes for our ideas of what's wrong with kids these days.

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