Today's Apocalypse Sign: While On Vacation I Leave You With This

I am in Belize this week and you are not :p


I want to credit Lucy Corrander from the photography blog Message In a Milk Bottle for inspiring this repost of a very early missive on suicide. Originally had five comments. I hope you find this interesting and entertaining. Thanks Lucy!!

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March 10th, 2010

Ivy League Suicide

The shocking stories of things that happen on college campuses these days are many and diverse. Topping the list is the incidence of suicide at many universities. None more so than the tragic year Cornell University of the Ivy League is having.

So far six students have jumped/fallen to their death from the 90-foot high suspension bridge that serves as a entrance from town to the campus. It is a bridge that I would have an apprehension of crossing on a good day. Me and heights are not friends in any sense of the word.

Samuell Cornell back in the late 1800's decided the best place to build a prestigious university that bares his name was right between two gorges. And you gotta be pretty damn deep to call yourself a gorge.

They even have a nickname for the suicides here... "gorging out". Macabe to say the least.

Even back in the early years of this university and through the 40's, 50's, 60's and heavily in the 90's suicides were happening here. What was it about this university that triggered the big bungee jump of life without the bungee? Was it just the lure of the bridge like a Siren song?

And what about jumping to your death as a suicide in general? It is a precarious thing to do. If you are not up high enough there is a chance you may not die and end up living like Stephen Hawking for the rest of your now incredibily worse off life. Too high you could get sucked into a jet engine (probably not, unless you pick a really bad place to jump from) but more importantly you have all that time from fatal step until terminal velocity impact to think about whether this is really what you wanted to do. No take backs. No do overs.

Stephen Hawking

But what would make a college student (and at Cornell a fairly smart one) decide on this course of action?

1. Was pressured all through high school to get into the Ivy League but maybe that was not your idea of fun.

2. Once you got to Cornell you found out there were really some smart fuckers here and you weren't one of them (see #1 above).

3. Date after date seems to end really badly and instead of calling Hitch you decide life is not worth living.

4. Oooooh, there's something shiny down there!

5. I learned about updrafts in Physics...here, I'll show you.

6. Sorry, looks like it's Animal House for you Stevie!

7. If my parents find out I'm failing every class they'll kill me anyway (tuition, bye bye)

I'll stop at 7 so this doesn't turn into some macabe/gallows humor Top Ten.

This is a serious issue for a University that has picked up the nickname of Suicide U. Below is video and an excerpt from a CNN site:




The national average for school suicides is 7.29 per year for every 100,000 students, said Paula Clayton, medical director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. That means Cornell, with 19,639 students, should average fewer than two suicides a year.

Cornell had no suicides from 2005 to 2008, according to Marchell. And the school has consistently fallen within or below the national average, said Karen Carr, assistant dean of students at Cornell.

The school has been praised by psychologists such as Keith Anderson, chairman of the American College Health Association's Mental Health Best Practices Task Force, for counseling and prevention programs that confront the issue of student suicide with comprehensive training and understanding.

Cornell responded to a cluster of suicides in the late 1990s with comprehensive training for members of the university community.

By Ross Levitt and Susan Candiotti, CNN
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I for one cannot imagine what it would take to make someone walk over to the railing of a bridge and jump off. I also cannot imagine why they do not have the same kind of covering over these bridges by now that you see on walk-ways over freeway so whackos can't throw a cinder block through your windshield. I get the aesthetics angle and all that but really, if this suicide epidemic is a decison of opportunity, simply remove the opportunity.

Just one more justification for always carrying a parachute!

With that said:

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