Under pressure: representations of student suicide in British documentary television

ABSTRACT

This article examines what the representation of university student suicide in three British television documentaries reveals about media constructions of suicide and the pressures young people experience at university. Within these documentaries, student suicide is positioned as a risk endemic in a high pressure, high-cost performance culture. Young students are depicted as stressed and ‘on the edge’, either as a consequence of the academic pressure of university or the coalescence of academic, financial and social pressures. Debates about the responsibility of individuals and the accountability of institutions come to the fore as depictions of students as fully fledged and responsible adults jostle with the notion of students as ‘adults in transition’, at risk and in need of institutions to actively monitor and intervene in their lives. The documentaries offer insight into shifting media constructions of the student from ‘fun loving’ and ‘carefree’ to ‘under pressure’ and ‘at risk’. Within them, student suicide is positioned not only as a profound personal loss, but as an economic loss to a society neglecting its young people.

KEYWORDS:

• student suicide
• student
• university
• suicide
• documentary
• media constructions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The authors have made the decision to include expletives in this article as it is believed they are necessary to communicate the meaning and context of the young people’s views in the documentaries.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kay Calver

Kay Calver is a Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Bedfordshire and a Senior Fellow of the HEA. Her research interests include youth transitions, inequality and the concept of fateful moments and critical turning points. Her doctoral thesis examined the educational experiences of pregnant and mothering young women. Kay has a professional background in special educational needs, sexual health and widening participation.

Bethan Michael-Fox

Bethan Michael-Fox works as an Associate Lecturer for the Open University, where she is an Honorary Associate in the School of English and Creative Writing. She is undertaking a three-year Visiting Research Fellow role at the University of Bath’s Centre for Death and Society and a two-year Early Career Researcher Fellowship in the Faculty of Arts Culture-Media-Text Research Centre at the University of Winchester. Beth works as the editorial Officer for Mortality and is a representative of the Association for the Study of Death and Society. She is the social media manager for the open access journal Revenant. Her research interests are interdisciplinary, predominantly centred around engagement with death and the dead in contemporary screen cultures.