Suicide education bill passes House and Senate

Public institutions of higher education will be required to advise students, faculty and staff how to identify and deal with suicidal behavior, in accordance with a bill that passed the General Assembly.

“I’m glad to see legislators recognize that we need this type of support,” said Jeffrey Pollard, director of George Mason University’s counseling center. “We’re trying to be as proactive as possible.”

House bill 3064 directs the governing boards of state colleges to develop and implement policies to advise students, faculty and staff, including residence hall staff, of the correct procedures for identifying and addressing the needs of students exhibiting suicidal behavior.

“Delegate (Albert) Eisenberg (D-Arlington) provided data on suicide rates from institutions of higher learning. I saw the need to develop policies to address the issue,” said Delegate Steve Shannon, D-Vienna.

The bill recieved bipartisan support and passed the House and Senate unanimously. Many of Virginia’s state schools are already in the process of creating new policies to deal with suicide.

“We have been doing more things relating to suicide on campus,” said Joy Bressler, assistant director for clinical services at VCU’s counseling services. “We already have policies in place in terms of identifying behavior.”

Bressler said VCU will be the first university to have a national suicide awareness day.

Pollard said GMU is in the process of implementing two new systems for identifying and treating suicidal behaviors.

The first system will teach counseling staff how to perform interventions on people with suicidal thoughts or gestures. The second system is a campus-wide identification program to help anyone on campus who’s had a suicidal thought or gesture.

College students register half the suicide rates of their same-age counterparts who aren’t in school, Pollard said.

“The new programs we’re implementing – one diagnostic, the other identification and referral – will cut that rate again by half,” Pollard said.

The American College Heath Association’s Spring 2005 National College Health Assessment surveyed 54,111 college students. The study reported 11 percent of females and 9 percent of males said they had seriously considered suicide in the past school year.

Virginia suicide facts, 1999-2003

-792 average yearly suicide deaths

-11th in the nation for cause of death

-Average of 13 suicides every 6 days

-Suicide rate: roughly 11.8 per 100,000

-Male suicide rate 3.8 times greater than female rate

-Highest suicide rate: 70+ age group (14 percent)

Source: Suicide Prevention Resource Center, Newton, MA, based on work supported by the Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

National student suicides

Students are estimated to have a suicide rate of 7.5 per 100,000, compared to 15 per 100,000 for young adults in the general population.

Suicide is the second leading cause of death among college students.

Suicide is the third leading cause of death among all youth ages 15-24.

In a 2002 survey of college and university counseling center directors, 85 percent reported increasing numbers of students with serious mental health problems and increased demands for campus-based psychological services.

In 2002, schools with active counseling centers reported that less than a third of students who died by suicide had received treatment at their centers.

Graduate students appear to have a much higher suicide rate than undergraduates: 10.6/100,000 versus 6.6/100,000

Based on a 2004 report by Ann Pollinger Haas, Morton Silverman and Bethany Koestner of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.