Banning classroom discussions of "challenging" topics such as suicide does not protect sensitive university students; it could cost some of them their lives.
I didn’t know anyone who committed suicide while I was at LSE 1961-64, though some girls cut themselves in non-suicidal gestures which attracted attention. But my (non-uni) brother’s three best friends killed themselves.
I was very close to suicide in 1965, ironically I was run down by a car while motorcycling with injuries regarded as probably fatal (except by me) and gained a lot of strength from how I dealt with it. In 1972, I was again close to suicide, I could see no hope of future happiness. In both cases, no-one around me seemed aware of how I felt. A girl I hadn’t seen for a while walked into my flat one evening, saw what was happening and began working on it. She had learned a lot of value in five years in India, leading me to go there, where I was fortunate to learn Vipassana meditation from a great teacher, S N Goenka. After my first course, suicide was never an option.
On topic, hiding things from people, limiting their exposure, is not a good idea. Each of us needs to find out for ourselves how best to live our lives, and censoring what we encounter can limit the response we might have in a damaging or dangerous situation, particularly if we encounter something harmful which had hitherto been deliberately hidden from us. Who makes the censorship decision? How much are they driven by their own views and experiences rather than a dispassionate assessment of potential threats (or not-really-threats)?
Thank you for this wise and thoughtful comment, and for the wisdom it contains. It seems to me that academics have become prisoners of a strange philosophy that more-or-less negates the entire purpose of higher education. The students pay the price.
This deserves expansion into a paper.
I didn’t know anyone who committed suicide while I was at LSE 1961-64, though some girls cut themselves in non-suicidal gestures which attracted attention. But my (non-uni) brother’s three best friends killed themselves.
I was very close to suicide in 1965, ironically I was run down by a car while motorcycling with injuries regarded as probably fatal (except by me) and gained a lot of strength from how I dealt with it. In 1972, I was again close to suicide, I could see no hope of future happiness. In both cases, no-one around me seemed aware of how I felt. A girl I hadn’t seen for a while walked into my flat one evening, saw what was happening and began working on it. She had learned a lot of value in five years in India, leading me to go there, where I was fortunate to learn Vipassana meditation from a great teacher, S N Goenka. After my first course, suicide was never an option.
On topic, hiding things from people, limiting their exposure, is not a good idea. Each of us needs to find out for ourselves how best to live our lives, and censoring what we encounter can limit the response we might have in a damaging or dangerous situation, particularly if we encounter something harmful which had hitherto been deliberately hidden from us. Who makes the censorship decision? How much are they driven by their own views and experiences rather than a dispassionate assessment of potential threats (or not-really-threats)?
Thank you for this wise and thoughtful comment, and for the wisdom it contains. It seems to me that academics have become prisoners of a strange philosophy that more-or-less negates the entire purpose of higher education. The students pay the price.