Imagine this:

It becomes possible to send colonies to distant star systems by putting them in suspended animation. The ships may be ion drive or some form of plasma drive, but in no case do the ships manage more than a few percentages of the speed of light, therefore it will take hundreds of years to get where they're going. Thus the need for coldsleep. A fairly typical sci-fi scenario, used in movies from Aliens to Pitch Black to 2001 and 2010.

In Anne McCaffrey's DragonsDawn book, she goes into quite a bit of detail about how the colony started off -- planting, reviving farm animals, building, etcetera. Of course there was the nemesis of Thread, and then some malcontents who managed to make a lot of trouble. One of those was a scientist who freaked out and wanted to go back to Earth, or at least send a beacon to try to call for help from Earth. In Aliens the Marines went to a colony world and found only Newt left alive of all the colonists. The point is, it seems that when we read or watch a colonization story the colony is always doing well and gets set upon by some outside forces. I don't think that we really have an accurate idea about what going to a far distant planet will entail with regards to human psychology.

Here on Earth, during the age of exploration, one got on a ship and sailed away. You got where you were going and came back to find just what you expected -- your family had only aged the time it took you to go and come back, any deaths had happened due to explainable causes such as old age, disease, injury. Even with the astronauts that went to the Moon the trip only took 8 days. There was no psychological disconnect with time.

But if you get on an ion drive colony ship and go into coldsleep it's a different matter. You go to sleep, and when you wake up you're in orbit around a planet hundreds if not thousands of lightyears from everything you have ever known. Even if you turned around right then, went back into coldsleep and came back, the world you know no longer exists. There is no way you could prepare for this, nor predict the psychological or sociological effects this would cause, because we have no way to duplicate this here on Earth. Your colonists may have gone through rigorous psychological testing procedures, but until they wake up in orbit around that distant world it's an abstract concept.

Not only that, but your survival is completely in your own hands. In a world where literally everything is alien. You can't call for help, there's nowhere to call -- the technology that sent you there is long gone back on Earth, if the Earth even exists anymore in a state that supports any kind of technology!

I think it's naive and optimistic to think that the colonists would pull together to help each other survive. I think the opposite would happen -- a breakdown both psychologically and sociologically. We can't assume that the reactions we have seen here on Earth would hold true on an alien world. There would undoubtedly be exceptions. But I couldn't tell you what factors would make those exceptions. I don't think anyone could.

That's the good sci-fi does, I think. Serious sci-fi thinks of these problems and puts them out in the public thought in a contained form. Ignore it, disagree with it, or take it as gospel, but a book is a literary virtual reality we can use to make us think about questions before they become real. Science does us no good if it gives us capabilities we're not prepared to deal with.