Suicide on Campus and the Pressure of Perfection
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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 just because of the literal "filters"...what makes Instagram more appealing in general than Facebook is that, being so focused on images and impulse sharing, it's much harder to get into political spats/debates...but it's much more difficult to convey "meh" or other negative emotions. If you focus on someone's Instagram, you can come away with a very distorted assessment of that person's life and emotions.
"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 themselves feel better because everyone else looks so good because they're making themselves feel better. It's effectively an arms race. (no pun intended)
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/10713599/No-mak...
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...
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.
> 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.
I possibly missed it but how does that compare to on campus? the supposed point of the article.
That said, if there is an uptick in this symptom of society at large, society should try to figure out the cause and then decide if this is a deal we're willing to make.
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.
This reads more like a gay issue than a school pressure issue. The author of the article may have an agenda - by the same author, "A University Recognizes a Third Gender: Neutral", "A Gender-Neutral Glossary", and "Writing Around Gender".[1]
The Huffington Post has an article about suicides at MIT: "It's not good enough to be "very good" or God forbid, just "good." Excellence has become the new average. What a burden for kids, especially those whose boats don't rise with the tide of increased expectations and higher and higher standards."[2]
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]
[1] http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s...
[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jerome-schultz/lowering-the-pr...
[3] http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/09/02/caltrain-begin...
Or maybe they are a journalist with a beat. Not saying that's definitely the case here, but someone writing on the same topic repeatedly is hardly rare - it's usually because it's something they've researched deeply and are knowledgeable in.
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?
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.
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 difference in methods).
Most of the article is speculation - sometimes by people working in suicide prevention but still speculation. It would be nice to see more rigorous research being used.
There are some good bits about the article: there's a message of hope.
But not including the contact details of suicide prevention services in an article like this is dangerous and irresponsible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complete_Manual_of_Suicide
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2059673.Kanzen_Jisatsu_Ma...
In the era of social media, such comparisons take place on a screen with carefully curated depictions that don’t provide the full picture. Mobile devices escalate the comparisons from occasional to nearly constant...Madison Holleran’s suicide provided what might be the ultimate contrast between a shiny Instagram feed and interior darkness. Ms. Holleran posted images that show her smiling, dappled in sunshine or kicking back at a party. But according to her older sister, Ashley, Madison judged her social life as inferior to what she saw in the online posts of her high school friends. An hour before she killed herself, she posted a dreamy final photo of white holiday lights twinkling in the trees of Rittenhouse Square.
I'm 22 (just graduated) and I got rid of my Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat about a year ago. It feels fantastic. I do miss messenger sometimes, but the benefit of not having my time/energy sucked out by Facebook far outweighs messenger's convenience.
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 completely opt out of either.
Maybe we could make a viral game like the ice bucket challenge except this challenge is to not post online when something amazing happens in your life. Just be quiet and know you got away with something.