Suicides in a Brazilian public university: documentary analysis of occurrences from 1990 to 2023

Abstract

This study aims to analyze suicide deaths in a public university in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from 1990 to 2023. It conducted documentary analysis of 32 suicide occurrences in the university. As a result, the study presents two main categories: Numbers that speak of time and pain: the portrayal of suicide in university settings, which demonstrates that suicide cannot be understood solely as a number, but as an expression of a web of pains that manifest in the educational context recurrently over time; and Pain that speaks of people: the singularity of student distress, which shows occurrences with similar characteristics, with the majority of people being associated with the university, consisting of men, especially young ones aged 20 to 25 years, predominantly in Humanities programs. The theoretical approach based on Frantz Fanon and Émile Durkheim enabled a shift from the idea of suicide as a phenomenon exclusively related to individual vulnerability to an understanding of suicide as a sociogenic phenomenon and as a social fact, according to the effect of social, economic, and cultural structures that inform student life. The study also problematizes the limitations of the “Janeiro Branco” (White January) and “Setembro Amarelo” (Yellow September) campaign-based models adopted in Brazil, which tend to individualize social distress. Suicide in university settings expresses serious mental health indicators and reinforces the need for student distress no longer being made invisible and for universities to constitute spaces of care, solidarity, and inclusion of collective coping strategies.