Families have to be more attentive to student welfare: Prof N Sethuraman
Chennai: The tragedy of two students killing themselves in a span of 24 hours in the SRM Institute of Science and Technology has shocked the academic community and must also jolt the parents off their smugness that their task is done once they manage the child's admission in a reputed institution.
While a 19-year-old girl jumped off the women's hostel building Sunday morning, allegedly due to depression triggered by some personal issue in her family, a male youth of the same age died in similar manner leaping from the top of the men's hostel around the same time Monday. Sources said he took the extreme step unable to cope up with academic stress.
Stating that both the students had killed themselves “due to depression”, SRMIST Registrar Prof N Sethuraman pointed out that the institution has on-campus counsellors in its psychiatry department to provide support and guidance to the needy students and there is a 24x7 online counselling system too “reaching out to every single student”. The two suicides happened despite such support mechanism, he regretted.
Explaining further the case of the boy who jumped to his death, the Registrar said he had failed in seven subjects in the first semester and was detained in four papers in the second semester. “Being summer vacation, there were not many students around. He was lonely as he was there to write his arrears exam and this would have resulted him to take a fatal step”, said Prof Sethuraman, stressing that the institution “has always advised and helped parents to be in constant touch with their children and with the teachers to have an update on their ward's performance and help them to do the best of their ability”.
Sources said the boy who fared poorly in the two semesters was actually an unwilling student of engineering and was forced into the line by his family whereas his interests had been elsewhere. Consequently, he found it tough to cope with the subjects and the thought that this must go on for the rest of the course could have distressed him.
Psychiatrists have time and again cautioned that the academic institution - and that means not the walls and the racks of books, but the faculty that must remain kind and concerned throughout and towards all - as well as the student's family must watch out for the 'amber' signs of the students passing through trauma and reach out quickly to pull him/her off the trajectory towards the 'red', the tragedy.
“I would blame the families more than the faculty; the faculty has a large volume of students to deal with whereas the family has just its own son or daughter to care for”, said Arun Fernandez, M.D., 'Blink Research Services' that deals with education and empowerment of students with learning disabilities.
He said, “And most families do not prepare the kid to handle failure, to understand that failure is actually an opportunity to create new destiny. Instead, the child grows up trained to believe he or she is constantly on the track competing with other kids and ends up believing that failure is the end of the world”.
