After accidents, suicide is the second biggest killer of kids in college. Last year alone, six Columbia University undergraduates or recent students died in incidents linked to clear or presumed mental disturbances. Among them was Kathleen Roskot, a sophomore stabbed to death by her boyfriend, a Columbia dropout, who later killed himself by jumping in front of a subway car. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, four students have committed suicide in the past three years. And Harvard University is still dealing with the fallout from a grisly 1995 murder- suicide in which a female student, who was feeling rejected by her roommate, stabbed her to death and then hanged herself.
College can be a breeding ground for psychiatric problems.
Additionally, many of the major psychiatric illnesses, including depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, often do not manifest themselves until the late teens or early 20s. Two decades ago, kids with severe forms of those illnesses may have been too sick to go to college. But with the advent of antidepressants and mood stabilizers like Prozac and Zoloft, many of these students can thrive on campus. College counselors say the number of students requesting mental-health services has climbed considerably in the past decade. The very effectiveness of modern treatment means that a lot of people who never would have made it into college are stable enough to go to universities, says Kay Redfield Jamison, a psychiatry professor at Johns Hopkins.