Caltech's going through a bad period: 3 suicides in 3 months

.. 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.

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.

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.

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.