College Suicides: Time to Respond to Our Children’s Spiritual Needs
This week I received an email from Princeton University with a tense announcement that, yet another student, a third this year, was found dead on campus. The police investigating did not suspect foul play. Though they cannot announce the cause until after the autopsy, I know it was another suicide. A stab in our collective heart.
She was a young Ethiopian woman who came to the United States as a child. We all know the enormous drive that it takes to get into Princeton. The demands of super accomplishments have reached levels of absurdity. And there are young people who rise to these challenges with great drive and determination. And what is on the other side when they reach this college dream? More of the same? A wheel of constant striving for the next promise of success. All the while, the drive for achievement is attended by external validation. These demands and rewards for relentlessly reaching and striving take their toll on well-being and can drain a young person of their self-awareness, self-worth, and self-care.
The rate of suicides on elite college campuses acutely mirrors what is happening in our society at large. This beautiful woman and all the youth like her are jumping off the cliff—- voluntarily. They are crying out for help. Enough of the emptiness of our rational material culture, the ravages of striving for rewards and status. And our response is an astounding silence about suicide and the call for action.
Suicide at this scale is a massive wake-up call.
We are living with the dramatic consequences of decades of social engineering from an increasingly rigid and materialistic approach to relationships and culture. The rigid bifurcation between state and religion conflated the institutions, the human power structures, with the spiritual core. And as the rituals and practices of ancient traditions were silenced and sidelined, so have the impulse and human thriving that they support. We threw out the spiritual core with the well intentioned separation of church and state. The religious institution is not the bearer of our spiritual being. It may be an organizing principle for some, but no institution owns the critical core of who we are. And honestly, the basic tenants of classical education have also been lost. Who am I and what do I want? What is my relationship to the world and the sacred that pulses through me? What is my meaning and purpose in connection to the whole?
As the generations pass, and we are more entrenched in a materialistic prism of life, we lose more and more connection to spiritual traditions and the awareness of other ways of knowing and understanding reality. The deep-felt calling and longing for connection to self and others is unattended. We have lost our guiding tenets of the heart and soul. Particularly in the past hundreds of years, we designed a public square, organized our schools, our institutions, and our politics around a sliver of who we are— that of a mind capable of processing information. Faith and intuition, our inner knowing and guidance, our deeper discernment have been increasingly sidelined and even denigrated. It is no small coincidence that the more rationally secular we have become, the less aware and connected we are becoming. And we are witnessing alarming consequences, with all the attendant maladies of despair -depression, addiction, stress, and ultimately an epidemic of suicide.
I wonder if that young Ethiopian woman was plagued by concerns that if she didn’t continue to get good grades, then she wouldn’t get the internship that leads to the job so that her parents and all could bask in her achievements. And all the while, the bright young woman was asking herself, “Who am I? And what do I want?”
Did she know that she is so much more than the paper trail of grades and scores? Did she know she could trust herself? Did she know that if she looked into the mirror long enough, she could see into the divine presence within nudging her to feel the deep satisfaction of being in the moment? Did she take her life because she was so out of alignment with her true north; the love of self that atrophied in a world where worth and value are purely transactional? Have we created institutions of hollow men and women? I hear ringing in my ears, the last words for all of us, “The horror, the horror.”
I pray we do better by her and the hundreds of youth who take their lives each year. This is an epidemic of great tragic proportions. It is a call to pivot from where we are and to support and nurture our children’s spiritual needs and longing. To love them for who they are and not what they do or have the potential to become. To love each one, as we may love ourselves.
