By Dr. Walter C. Alvarez

Emeritus Consultant in Medicine, Mayo Clinic and Emeritus Professor of Medicine, Maye Foundation

Suicide in British Students

A writer in a recent number of the British Medical Journal is concerned over the high suicide rate among male university students in England, and he enumerates a number of the possible causes. He speaks of ill-fated love-affairs, worries over money, difficulties in making proper grades in school, moral perplexities and the strain of social adjustment that students from poor families sometimes experience when they start to associate with men from good families. Some of the students have

trouble due to laziness, or to too many outside interests, or a wrong choice of subjects for study or emotional upsets. Some cannot face failure when

it comes to them; some have such difficulties with sexual adjustments that they develop a fear of sex, and many a one is appalled when he discovers he is homosexual. Doubtless the main difficulty

with most of these students is that they have a hereditary tendency to a depression. As I show in my recent book. which is based on a study of what happened in a nervous way to the many members of over 600 nervous families, there are many families in which two or three members have taken their own life. I read that we are likely to have trouble this coming summer because 98,000,000 of our people have not taken the trouble to get injections of the Salk vaccine. Only about half of our 24,000,000 children under six have received the full series of shots. That the

dangers of a polio epidemic are not entirely gone was shown! last year when the incidence of paralytic polio rose 44% as compared with the incidence in 1957. Mothers who love their children certainly ought to have them vaccinated against polio. It takes so little time,

and it might well save the child a life-time of suffering. Dr. Alvarez' booklet on weight control may be obtained by sending 25 cents and a large, stamped. self-addressed envelope with your request to Dr. Walter C. Alvárez. Dept. CPD, The Register and Tribune Syndicate, Box 957, Des Moines Iowa.