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This is an interesting and fresh approach to the problem of suicidal patients in a college population. Hendin considers such frequently mentioned factors as the competitive strain of college life, but he goes well beyond such issues. While he found that a significantly high proportion of seriously suicidal students had actually lost a parent, he emphasizes as crucial the quality of feeling between student and parents while the parents are alive. Hendin's basic thesis is that these students were drawn to death as a way of life, as an ongoing part of their adaptation. They saw their relationships with their parents as dependent on their emotional, if not their physical, death. At college the meaning of suicide and depression lay in the student's encounter with experiences that might unleash his potential for freedom. The students Hendin studied came from families in which the relationship between the parents and family life as a whole were essentially dead. Being happy meant giving up the past and the more secure part of themselves. To maintain a parental bond, feelings had to be extinguished. An invitation to freedom would constitute an irreparable separation. Depression thus prolonged the students' ties with their parents, warded off the intensity of their rage, and avoided a new life with its consequent anxieties.
The concepts Hendin presents deserve serious consideration, although it is quite possible to interpret the clinical data differently.