I asked some of my friends a series of questions to see how they felt about mental health and how it’s being dealt with at the college level. Some people had very similar answers while others took different approaches to each question. Everyone was asked similar questions about their feelings towards mental health, how the school is dealing with it and whether they think the school has good health facilities.
While doing these interviews I really learned that even though we all go through different things, we can still find similarities within our different situations. Everyone has their own way of seeing certain situations based on how they were raised or just personal opinions.
Kelly, one of my best friends, is a commuter. Compared to the others interviewed she has a different perspective due to not living on campus. Growing up she was always told “…mental health, like depression and all that, is just something people say to get attention… It’s like the way I was raised mental health wasn’t a real thing, it is just something that happens in your mind and you just have to deal with it and stop making excuses.”
She is afraid to talk to people because she doesn’t want the attention as well as be a burden on anyone. I think many people can relate to that.
That was a VERY common theme presented throughout the interviews. Everyone felt like people were scared or uncomfortable to talk about mental health due to feeling judged or embarrassed or even that they don’t have a safe space for it. Living on campus create different kinds of issues when it comes to getting the help you need.
My friend, Ibrahim, thinks there is “…definitely a stigma around mental health so you’re expected to– especially like in your friend group and things like that– you’re expected to always be fine. Especially on a college campus. You walk around and you kinda have to smile often or like you don’t have a place– especially as a freshman– to like be by yourself sometimes and just take that time off do it’s difficult to express how you actually feel.” You have to put on this front like everything is okay all the time when in actuality it might not be. No one can truly say how much they feel they are struggling.
I asked them what they struggle with most as a college student. Some said time management, a few said stress and procrastination, some even said just being happy. College is a very stressful time because of all the pressure that is put on you to do good in college because without college you can’t get a good job or house or anything like that. A few of my friends feel like college overly stresses students.
Raesha, a friend from high school, feels that if “they can not put so much pressure on us having perfect gpas to do anything with ourselves in the future.” Maybe if society lowers the pressure they put on college, maybe there would be less mental health issues because people wouldn’t be stressing as much. Stress has a lot to do with mental health, it causes other things to form like anxiety or depression.
Everyone I talked to feels like Rowan does not have the best facilities for dealing with health issues. They all had different reasons but the overall was the same. Some think we need more professionals, others think we need safer spaces.
I think we need to stop avoiding it because it is really becoming a problem. I think we should make it socially okay to talk about mental health and find better ways to manage it on campuses.
~Zierra Miranda
