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B.C. has the strongest concentration of foreign students in Canada and Canada accepts more of these students per capita than any other country, except Australia. There are roughly 130,000 international students in B.C., mostly in Metro Vancouver, out of a total of more than 500,000 in the country.

The B.C. Coroners Service did not release any data on the citizenship of students who took their own lives, the suicide methods used or the apparent reasons for the suicides.

However, theAustralian coroner’s study found it was young men from Asia who were most likely to kill themselves, including because they want to keep poor grades hidden from their parents.

That’s in contrast, the Australian report found, to motivations behind suicides by domestic students, who were more likely to have experienced some form of abuse, discrimination or mental illness.

Even while the rate of suicide among international students appears to not be as high as the provincial average for young adults, Stephany, author of How to Help the Suicidal Person, explained some of the distinct forces squeezing foreign students.

In some cultures, she said, “suicide is an acceptable form of dealing with dishonouring your family. The pressure can be super-high on some students to succeed, and if they don’t, suicide becomes the default.”

Stephany, who has a PhD in counselling psychology, tells of a female nursing student who was the product of China’s one-child policy. “The pressure on her to succeed was unbelievable, because her parents told her they could have given her up for adoption and had a boy.” Struggling with English, the student crashed out of the nursing program, but eventually returned and passed.