"Wave"

The press continued to give prominence to suicides among U. S. school and college students, of whom 15 killed themselves last fortnight, bring the total for the so-called "wave" to 36 since New Year's (TIME, Feb. 7 et seq.). One enterprising news agency furnished an exclusive account of a girl student's suicide in Constantinople. A Cambridge University man slew himself. The opinion of almost anyone as to an underlying "cause" for the "wave," continued to make good copy.

Mrs Otto H. Kahn received ladies of the Girls' Service League of America at her home and a speaker flayed "lack of close contact between young people and their parents."

One Freeman Hopwood, secretary of something called the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism, explained that in almost every student suicide case the unfortunate young person had believed in God.

The analysis of President Mary E. Woolley of Mount Holyoke College was "unrest and disorganization following the War."

President Harry M. Warren of something called the Save-a-Life League described shell-shocked cases he had examined in his "salvorium" (saving place) and said that the student cases differed from those unnerved soldiers in being cases of "thrill-hunting." He thought most college students and instructors today were too young, falsely sophisticated.

Bishop William F. Anderson, Boston Methodist, paused during his labors at a ministerial conference in New Jersey to explain that the suicide "epidemic" was due to failure of religious instruction in the home; also to "the tenseness of modern living," "physical pleasures," "material values."

That a "wave" or "epidemic" really existed; that student suicides were actually more numerous in 1927 than in 1917 or 1907, and not simply made to seem so by the avidity with which newspapers smelled out the school affiliations, past and present, of every 1927 suicide under 30 years of age, remained undemonstrated. Evidence to support the "wave" theory was visible only in isolated cases. The self-hanging of Bruce Frederick Wilson, Princeton sophomore, closely followed the self-hanging of a Yale sophomore and the self-asphyxiation of a Princeton graduate student. In the wallet of Mclntire Harsha, University of Chicago freshman found shot dead among Indiana sand dunes, was a news clipping about student discontent (but his father mentioned a love affair).

Chief Statistician Louis I. Dublin of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. published surprising statistics on juvenile suicide in general. Among two million persons aged 15 to 19 the suicide rate for white boys was 6.7 per 100,000 in 1911, 6.16 in 1912. In 1913 it reached a maximum of 7.3 per 100,000. In 1923 it dropped to a minimum of 1.7. In 1925 and 1926 it rose to 3.9 per 100,000. Until 1921, more girls than boys aged 15 to 19 killed themselves. Lately the boy's rate has been the higher.