Study Finds Suicidal Thoughts to Be More Common Among College Students

A new study has found that over half of 26,000 students across 70 colleges and universities had at least one episode of suicidal thinking at some point in their lives.

Also, 15 percent of students surveyed reported having seriously considered attempting suicide and more than 5 percent reported making a suicide attempt at least once in their lifetime.

Psychologist David J. Drum, PhD, and co-authors at the University of Texas at Austin have reported their findings from a Web-based survey conducted by the National Research Consortium of Counseling Centers in Higher Education.

The researchers found that six percent of undergraduates and 4 percent of graduate students reported seriously considering suicide within the 12 months prior to answering the survey.

Therefore, the researchers posit, at an average college with 18,000 undergraduate students, some 1,080 undergraduates will seriously contemplate taking their lives at least once within a single year.

Approximately two-thirds of those who contemplate suicide will do so more than once in a 12-month period.

The majority of students described their typical episode of suicidal thinking as intense and brief, with more than half the episodes lasting one day or less.

The survey showed that, for a variety of reasons, more than half of students who experienced a recent suicidal crisis did not seek professional help or tell anyone about their suicidal thoughts.

In the study, researchers used separate samples of undergraduate and graduate students. College sizes ranged from 820 to 58,156 students, with 17,752 being the average.