Suicide on Campus and the Pressure of Perfection
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Reported by then-Times staff writer Julie Scelfo for the paper's Education Life section, this piece centers on a high-achieving high school student to examine how intense academic competition, near-constant online tracking of grades and test scores, and social comparison combine into pressures that counseling directors and researchers quoted in the piece link to rising stress and, in some cases, suicidal thinking among students. The article describes a school and college culture in which perfectionism and visible peer achievement are associated with elevated anxiety, without attributing suicide to any single cause. TechKids Foundation cites it as an early mainstream framing of social-comparison and academic-pressure risk factors that predates most of today's device-specific research.
Scelfo, Julie. "Suicide on Campus and the Pressure of Perfection." The New York Times, August 2, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/education/edlife/stress-social-media-and-suicide-on-campus.html