PSYCHOSOCIAL PREDICTORS OF SUICIDE IN 2 GENERATIONS OF UNIVERSITY SUTDENTS

This paper analyzes the suicidal ideation in young college students, a nd the associated and predicting variables. The data gathered belongs to male and female students who started university in 1993 and 1995 at a private school, and are in the middle or final years of their carri ers. Youth is considered as a stage of consolidation and crystallizati on of vocational election. In their transition to adult life they have to define their relations with society through their personal and lab oral activities. Most of them experience, anxiety loneliness, fear of failure and error when facing the future, because they fear to be on t heir own from now on. The stress generated during this stage, the way they face it the dilemma between hope and disparity and lack of self-s teem can lead to self-destruction by means of drug addiction, dangerou s sex, delinquency, accidents and even suicide. The idea of suicide, d efined by Garrison et al (11) as ''having thoughts or fantasies regard ing death of himself'', have been less investigated than the actual at tempt and real suicide. The ideas or fantasies of self-destruction hav e been associated to dispair and low self-steem, interpersonal conflic ts with partner or parents, school or work failures, depression, suici dal attempts and drug abuse. In Mexico, 47 % university students in th eir middle and last years have at least one symptom of ideas or fantas ies of self destruction, 17 % have thought of doing it, and 10 % infor med having the four symptoms of the scale (22). The investigation of s uicidal ideation is important because of its accepted association with the attempt of self destruction and because the epidemiological tende ncies of suicide increase nationally and internationally. The main obj ectives of the study were to find out the prevalence of these ideas an d fantasies among young college students in order to establish its rel ation between variables of protection and risk with ideas and fantasie s of self-destruction, and to identify the predicting variables of thi s emotional state. The adolescent version of the CESD, developed by Ro berts (26), and previously tested among Mexican students by Gonzalez-F orteza and Andrade Pales (12) was used for evaluating students. Betwee n 27 % and 30 % of the university students had one more symptoms of su icidal ideation. Female students experienced the four symptoms more of ten than male students, and its persistence was of 3 %. Self-steem was the variable predicting protection for men and women of both generati ons. Social stress predicting risk was common in the male students of gen 93 and in women of both generation. Though the prevalence of suici dal ideation is lower in university students than in junior and high s chool students, the prevalence in university students should be lowere d in order to deminish its incidence at an earlier age.