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Thursday, March 29, 2012

Preventing Suicide on Campus May Mean Fences and Nets as Well as Counseling


Chronicle of Higher Education
By Michael Stratford
Originally published March 25, 2012

The families of students who die by suicide often seek to hold colleges responsible.

Lawsuits typically claim that an institution failed to pick up on warning signs or to adequately protect a student whom campus officials knew to be suicidal.

Far less often does a legal action cite, say, the absence of fences on a bridge.

But a lawsuit now pending against Cornell University in federal court takes that approach: It argues that the institution didn't do enough to restrict access to a particular means of suicide.

Specifically, Howard I. Ginsburg alleges that Cornell was negligent for not having installed barriers on the campus bridge where, in February 2010, his son, Bradley, jumped to his death.

A judge this month rejected the university's effort to have the suit dismissed, ruling that the case could continue.

Limiting access to certain methods of suicide, a strategy known as means restriction, has been gaining traction among mental-health researchers.

Some suicides can be prevented, the logic goes, if it's more challenging for an impulsive individual to harm himself.

But on most campuses, that strategy has not taken hold.

 Instead, counseling and education tend to be the centerpiece of suicide-prevention efforts.

 Only at a few institutions, mainly where students' suicides have made headlines in recent years--like Cornell, New York University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology--have administrators acted, beyond locking doors to roofs, to significantly alter physical elements of the campus in the name of prevention.

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For not taking steps to block bridge suicides, the lawsuit says, both Cornell and the city were "negligent, careless, and reckless in failing to provide for safety and protection for vulnerable or impulsive individuals."

University and city officials, Mr. Ginsburg argues, knew that area bridges were a recurring site of suicides and therefore had an obligation to restrict access to them.

Cornell says it is "vigorously" fighting the suit, which Mr. Ginsburg filed in November.


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Thanks to Ken Pope for this information.