Word: giedinghagen
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...Anne Giedinghagen wanted desperately to stay in school. Having struggled with depression and anorexia since the sixth grade, the rail-thin Cornell junior was meeting regularly with a therapist at the university's counseling center in Ithaca, N.Y. But late last fall, when she told her therapist about her increasingly strong urge to kill herself, Giedinghagen received an ultimatum from the school she loved so much: she had to get better or she would have to leave. So she did what any crafty 20-year-old would do. She tried to carve out a third option--feigning improvement...
...Giedinghagen is one of thousands of troubled college students who each year are forced to make such stark choices. With two recent court rulings holding that college administrators may be held partly responsible for student suicides--which total some 1,100 a year nationwide, making suicide the second leading cause of death among college students, after motor-vehicle accidents--many universities have hastily adopted mandatory-leave policies in an effort to reduce the risk of self-inflicted, on-campus deaths. But a tragic result, say psychiatrists and student advocates, is that emotionally distressed students may be less willing to come...
While Illinois rarely advocates taking time off from school, Cornell pushes a hundred or so of its students each year to take a voluntary medical leave that allows them not only to get help but also to de-stress. In Giedinghagen's case, it didn't take long for her to realize her fake-it-till-you-make-it strategy wasn't working. By April, she says, "the stress was so bad that I knew if I stayed at Cornell one more week, I would kill myself." After lengthy discussions with her therapists, the double major in German and neurobiology...
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