We want LI to be one of the friendliest places on the internet, where lawyers and law students help each other with their career related queries and occasionally discuss other stuff that might affect their lives too. In other words:
1. Be kind, respectful and helpful to each other.
2. Be bona fide, truthful, genuine and curious.
3. Assume the best intention of others.
Therefore, in using the site, you must agree to do your best to uphold these community guidelines.
Note that what you find here is written and moderated by anonymous people on the internet.
Therefore everything you read here is very likely unverified, rumour, speculation and/or downright false.
In continuing to read anything here, you must therefore agree not to take anything you read here as factual and that you will exercise due caution, diligence and common sense before acting on any information you may come across here.
You also agree to report any inaccurate or malicious comments with the buttons. Moderators take action within 24 hours, as required and appropriate under law.
Our full terms and conditions apply too.
Do you solemnly agree to all of the above?
To answer your specific question, of course university makes the mental health of people whose situation is already difficult worse! What did you expect? Peer pressure and a cutthroat environment where people care exclusively about themselves, young people (many of whom are appallingly unprepared for university life) suddenly being treated as full-grown adults, a shocking lack of qualified mental health professionals, admins who don't give a shit about students but only about keeping their jobs, currying favour with the right people (read: oiling politicians' backsides) and lining their pockets, a society as judgemental (if not more) than England (once again, see Oliver joking about the levels of scrutiny that the lives of even minor functionaries within the royal family are subjected to)? The mixture is lethal!
Absolutely no one for any reason should kill themselves for any thing that happens at university. No college drama is worth that at all. In my university batch there were people who didn’t graduate, women who went through sexual assault, people who took so many mind altering substances they were barely holding on, people who faced bullying, ostracisation, degradation and humiliation, people who came from messed up families- all of it. One of our batchmates died in an accident and that messed up his friends a fair bit. But not one of us committed suicide. And guess what? - years later, college is over, and all of that stuff just seems so petty. So unbelievably insignificant. These people are now doing well in their careers and most have a spouse and kids. It would have been silly and terribly short sighted to commit suicide then and not stick around for everything good that life has to offer.
We can find all sorts of things to blame it on. Drug culture , academic rigor , lack of academic rigor, love failure , career uncertainty, lost a job, failed too many subjects , assault or violence, whatever. Many of those things will not change. It’s really hard to change culture. It’s really hard to create a world where no one considers suicide. It’s far easier to identify people at risk and for those people to do some CBT so they can avoid harming themselves.
Just my two cents of analysis.