Chronic disease in former college students. 3. Precursors of suicide in early and middle life.

Abstract

A total of 225 suicides were identified among approximately 40,000 male former students of the University of Pennsylvania and of Harvard University. Living classmates were randomly chosen to provide 450 control subjects for comparison with the suicides. Case-taking and other college records were examined for potential precursors of the self-destruction that evolved later in life. Familial, physical, sociocultural, and psychological characteristics emerged as correlates of subsequent suicide. The strongest indicators were psychological traits, and the other characteristics seemed important chiefly through their psychological implications. The differentiating familial characteristics included college training of parents, professional status of the father, marital separation of parents, and death of the father. Distinguishing physical characteris -tics of the subsequent suicides were average height, status of under -weight, allergic predisposition, and self-assessed ill health. Sociocultural correlates were the characteristics of secondary boarding school student, cigarette smoker, nonparticipant in extracurricular activities including athletics, and failure to graduate from college. The distinguishing psychological traits, when self-assessed by the student, were insomnia, worry, self-consciousness, persecution, secretive-seclusiveness, and a complex of anxiety-depression. The role of the father assumed special prominence in the male suicide background, since paternal deprivation was a significant element and the loss of the mother was not. Professional status of the father also seemed to contribute either a deprivation of paternal guidance or the creation of a difficult model for emulation by the son. Substitution of guidance for the loss or absence of a father may constitute an effective and important preventive measure which college and other social agencies are capable of providing.