America's Quietest Emergency: Exposing, identifying and analyzing suicide contagion in institutions of higher learning

Suicide is a leading cause of death among college students. Given their developmental stage and living situations, university students may be particularly susceptible to suicide contagion and media-influenced suicide contagion (Ballesteros et al., 2024). Suicide clusters can be specific to a location, such as a university, and the emergence of a cluster can put that location at greater risk for future clusters. Additionally, young people are already particularly susceptible to the contagion effect (Gould et al., 1990). Identifying suicide clusters makes effective intervention more likely than if no cluster exists, and effective intervention can save lives. This intervention should include bereavement support, help for at-risk individuals, population-based approaches, and proactive engagement with the media.
The present study aims examines suicide on college campuses as a public health issue, and identifies methods by which university administrators, mental health services, or public health officials can actively identify past or ongoing suicide clusters, and effective prevention measures that should be employed if a cluster is suspected or established. I first provide some background on suicide contagion, review current methods for identifying suicide clusters, and identify limitations with these methods. Then, using data from the university-based, nation-wide Healthy Minds Survey, I expose limitations in the quality of currently available data, and illustrate how those limitations constrain deployment of effective interventions in the university setting, and ultimately prevent public health officials and academic administrators from saving lives.