What Parents and Emerging Adults Should Know
College life can be a health hazardous. The information below is critical for emerging adults’ well being.
- Estimated at 1,100 student deaths annually1
- Suicide is the second leading cause of death among North Americans of college age2
- Annual rate of one per ten thousand nationwide2
- For every successful suicide, there are 40 failed attempts2
- Some colleges ask those who’ve disclosed thoughts of suicide to withdraw, inadvertently keeping students from seeking help1
- At Harvard University, from 2001 to 2003, visits by undergraduates to the mental health counseling center had increased 30% to 4,871 students2
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Julie Carpenter died in April 2001—she was the sixth suicide in four years2
- Before that, Elizabeth Shin had emolliated herself at MIT and in 2000—the Shin family sued MIT for $27 million2
- A study of college students’ mental health reported incidents of depression and suicidal thoughts doubled during the 1990s2
- Average age of onset for depression dropped from 29 to 20 in just two decades2
- 40% of college men and 50% of college women surveyed said they had experienced depression so severe at some point in time that they could “barely function,” 14.9% said they had been medically diagnosed with clinical depression7
- Over the course of a lifetime, about 0.5 to 3.7% of girls and women will develop anorexia nervosa,3 sup a psychiatric diagnosis that describes an eating disorder characterized by low body weight and body image distortion with an obsessive fear of gaining weight. Individuals with anorexia often control body weight by voluntary starvation, purging, vomiting, excessive exercise, or other weight control measures, such as diet pills or diuretic drugs. It primarily affects adolescent females, however approximately 10% of people with the diagnosis are male. Anorexia nervosa is a complex condition, involving psychological, neurobiological, and sociological components
- About 1.1 to 4.2 % will develop bulimia nervosa,3 commonly known as bulimia, is an eating disorder and psychological condition in which the subject engages in recurrent binge eating followed by feelings of guilt, depression, and self-condemnation and intentional purging to compensate for the excessive eating, usually to prevent weight gain (see anorexia nervosa). Purging can take the form of vomiting, fasting, inappropriate use of laxatives, enemas, diuretics or other medication, or excessive physical exercise. The cycle damages bodily organs. Bulimia is common especially among young women of normal or nearly normal weight
- About 0.5 % of those with anorexia die each year as a result of their illness, making it one of the top psychiatric illnesses that lead to death3
- Eating disorders have their highest rate of incidence in college-aged women7