It's fucking scandalous that MIT tolerates such a high level of death by suicide.
I agree zero should be the goal, but I don't think it's necessarily achievable. There are multiple factors involved, and the school only controls some of them. Some of them aren't really controllable. (There were multiple suicides at MIT while I was there; none of them were simple cases of "the school didn't pay enough attention".)
http://www.henryford.com/body.cfm?id=46335&action=detail&ref...
If they can do it then a university can definitely do it.
I do understand the sentiment behind "zero is the aim, but pragmatically we can't stop all suicides", but that attitude allows people to die.
Even if we do accept that we can't stop every death by suicide we can say that the rate is currently far too high.
As one example: People have mentioned deaths from tall buildings. Research shows that you can reduce suicide rates by restricting access to means and methods, so better access[1] controls to rooftops, with anti-suicide fencing, and suicide-prevention telephone number signs, will reduce the numbers of people dying by suicide.
I'm not sure how comparable the two situations are, although there are certainly measures in the article you linked to that could be applied anywhere. The two populations in question (Detroit mental health services patients vs. MIT students) are very different, as are the environments.
> better access controls to rooftops
This was done while I was at MIT, but I think the controls were relaxed again some years after I left. One of the issues with any institution over time is that different administrations have different priorities, and often change things for no good reason. MIT, unfortunately, is not immune to this problem.
Not at all. I went to a school when engineering was in high demand, and most of the students seemed to be in the program mainly because of the abundance of jobs. Most of the students seemed to disdain people who were really interested in technology and science. Most of the instructors were demoralized by the low quality of the students and had a lot of contempt for the students. It was hard to find a lab partner who could do the work. Most students seemed to be slackers and disparaged students who tried to do things outside of class. The administration was uncaring as well. It was a shitty experience and I had always been envious of the MIT, CalTech, and Berkeley students. I have a lot more respect for the grads from those schools than from my school.
There were no suicides. And that's in the canadian province (excluding territories) with the highest suicide rate, especially for young men. I did hear about one person who collapsed during an end-of-semester presentation. From stress and exhaustion, I'm assuming.
My theory is that it's because the atmosphere was very much more cooperative than competitive. No one was competing for grades, it wasn't rare to have the whole class helping each other out before exams. There was no grading on a curve, and I think most people realized that at the end of the day grades were not really that important to get a job. Turns out I wish I had realized that they were important to get scholarship money in grad school, but hey, at least I had fun working on awesome projects (while fucking up on exams).
From the campus talk, it seems the Medicine program had it way harder. Very competitive to get into specialties or whatever. There definitely were suicides one in a while.
I still have very intense school-related nightmares from time to time, even though I'm now in my mid-30s. I decided to drop-out in my last year of CS school, but before that almost any joy of attending my school lectures or studying for its exams had been killed off inside of me (luckily enough for me I discovered PHP and Python during my student years in my free time, which gave me back the joy of building and discovering things).