Comment by brandnewlow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brandnewlow | Hacker News Reader

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As a former university employee, I'd say what's odd here isn't that 3 people committed suicide at CalTech, it's that they did it so closely together.

These things happen at schools. I don't the stats myself, but thousands of times each year doesn't sound too far off.

But at a place like Cal Tech, when this happens once, the school DROPS THE HAMMER on the student body for a time to try and head it off from happening again. At Princeton, where I went to school and worked, that meant a flood of counselors, town hall meetings in all the dorms, a spate of articles in the papers, etc. Wall to wall discussion to make sure that if you know someone who's struggling, they get some help. This emphasis fades of course, and who knows how effective it really is, but I do know that numbers at the counseling centers would shoot up for a time as students were encouraged and felt comfortable seeking help.

So if you run a school and this happens three times in 3 months, I imagine the administration would be pretty upset and worried.

what's odd here isn't that 3 people committed suicide at CalTech, it's that they did it so closely together.

Actually, it's not odd at all. Robert Cialdini mentions this as "Social Proof".

From Page 146 of Influence: "Phillips also found that this tendency for suicides to beget suicides occurred principally in those parts of the country where the first suicide was highly publicized and that the wider the publicity given the first suicide, the greater the number of later suicides."

On Page 148, there is a chart that shows "Fluctuation in number of suicides before, during and after month of suicide story".

So, apparently, the right thing to do is NOT TO publicize the first suicide!

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion on Amazon: http://bit.ly/yXKwu

Yes, it's true -- people who are thinking of committing suicide are more likely to do so after hearing about someone else who commits suicide. (This is also true for other acts, like murder-suicides.) There's a lot of research on this.

But it doesn't necessarily follow that the right response is to try to cover up suicides. For one thing, people who are at Caltech are bound to hear of anyone who commits suicide at Caltech. For another, it's hard to cover up anything that happens to someone, particularly a young person, in the era of Facebook and Twitter. Third, counseling can actually work for those who get the counseling. Most suicidal people can be helped by one strategy or another: cognitive-behavioral therapy, antidepressant drugs... even just frank discussion can help. Remember, a large number of suicide attempts (in the USA, at any rate, and especially among women) aren't actually meant to succeed. Just because the phrase "a cry for help" is a hopeless cliche doesn't mean that most suicides are not, in fact, cries for help.

And, of course, even if some genius psychometrician crunched numbers on all the above scenarios and concluded that the best response to a suicide would be a coverup and the silent treatment... nobody would believe it, and the school would get hammered, in public and in court, for trying such a policy. After all, the same aspects of culture that recognize many suicide attempts as desperate last-ditch cries for help also recognize that the appropriate response of your friends and family is to... offer help.

I am not saying you should cover it up; just don't publicize it. I agree with you on the counseling bit -- take action, but again, be discreet about it.

Regd, students hearing about it, I am not so sure. One was in CS, the other in Chem, not sure about the 3rd. Precisely because we are in the era of FB & T, many might not have heard about it when compared to a university wide email.

The study you mentioned describes a different situation, suicides within a media coverage area when the media hypes an initial suicide. That's hardly a similar situation to a college campus, where the administration can respond by making counseling resources available. There are also studies that show that an initial suicide may actually have a preventative effect for further suicides within a closely-related population. (http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/154/2/120, for instance, though that was just a quick google, and I'm not vouching for how good it is).

Please don't use bit.ly links.

Here's the expanded link.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/006124189X?ie=UTF8&tag=...

Thank you, sounds like a good book!@

Odd from the school's perspective, where as far as I know, these approaches tend to be successful deterrents to "breaking up" any possible copycats. I was just working in admissions, but everyone pushing papers at a university gets the same e-mails from the higher ups about what's being done for the students in situations like this.

Interesting, that suggests that there is a sawtooth curve to the number of suicides. If that's true the conclusion might be that 'preventative counseling' is at too low levels where there has not been a recent crisis.

.. unless the expected suicides are a lower cost to society than the preventative counseling. Perhaps the clamp down is an overreaction. I doubt it's an efficiently designed mechanism to keep the costs even.

There's always some limit to how much we'll spend trying to prevent things from happening. For instance, you could tie people together in groups of 3 to reduce the successful suicide rate. I think most people would rather allow some suicides than take 2 people to the bathroom with them, or for that matter, getting dragged into monitor 2 others' trips to the bathroom.

You could also argue whether all suicides cost society.

It's a classic PID controller issue, not to put a technical slant on a tragedy, but if a mechanism oscillates like that chances are that you can 'dampen' the oscillations by choosing your parameters with more care.

I find it hard to think of this in terms as 'cost to society', there is something very creepy about that.

Every death is a tragedy, and suicides because of a lack of counseling (and for instance an excess in pressure to perform) seem to me to be a total waste.

I agree about the parameters, mostly. Only gotcha is the Influence/Cialdini reference someone rightly made, which may indicate that no change may be required.

I find it easier to think about in terms of 'cost to society.' See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectualization .. which of course I only learned about in counseling. I value it a lot. However, I only skimmed through, but I didn't see a claim that these cases were "because of a lack of counseling."

If you're going to think about it in terms of social 'cost', you may as well think of it over the span of a person's life. Society has invested a lot of... capitol? ... whatever it is that society invests in these people. University students in particular have been a social burden for most of their lives. But the reason society bears this is that the investment will pay in increased social benefit once they graduate.

So students, at least, shouldn't kill themselves. And society should protect its investment by keeping them from doing it. A cold hearted analysis, but that's the name of the 'social cost' game.

Jeffrey Dahmer attended Ohio State University. Joseph Stalin attended seminary (!). Osama Bin Laden went to King Abdulaziz University.

Man, I'm almost up to literally advocating the devil now.

To be fair, flipping through the famously despised people, a really large % of them either dropped out of high school (Hitler, Manson) or college (Dahmer). I was going to say it was surprising, but really, when your sample set is people we all consider to be really messed up, it kinda makes sense.

Ted Kazcynski comes to mind...

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