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What causes depression in college students
Depression among college students essay
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Depression and anxiety among college students is something that experts have focused on for the past twenty years. The information they have been gathering ranges from the different stressors of college life to the effects of one's culture on how they deal with depression or anxiety symptoms. They have identified a few core characteristics of depression and thoughts of suicide. These are both serious concepts in which people need to seek help for. It is important for students to reach out to friends, family, or professionals to support them during this time. Many campuses offer counseling centers which are seeing many more people over the past few years.
In the past 35 years the suicide rate for college campuses has tripled (Oswalt 1995). This shows that there is a clear need for something to be addressed within the college community. The recent surveys show that about 10-15% of college students are depressed (Lindsey 2009). Depression can be a debilitating illness especially when many students attend college away from their close friends and family. This could result in students with more suicidal thoughts and attempts at suicide. In fact, the number of students with suicidal thoughts has tripled over the past 13 years as the number of students seeking help for depression doubled in the same span (Lindsey 2009). Depression can effect these teens in other areas of their life as well. The students who reported that they were depressed also reported that they considered their health fair or poor (Lindsey 2009). In their cases, depression not only effects them psychologically but also physically. Depression is also known to impair psychosocial development and academic success (Lindsey 2009). With all of these factors put togethe...
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...and Alcohol." Jed Foundation. (https://jedfoundation.org/documents/DepressionandAlcohol.pdf).
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Lindsey, Billie. 2009. "THE PREVALENCE AND CORRELATES OF DEPRESSION AMONG COLLEGE STUDENTS." College Student Journal 43 (4): 999-1014.
Oswalt, Robert . 1995. "College Depression: causes, duration, and coping." Psychological Reports 77 (3): 858.
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Voelker, Rebecca. 2004. "Stress, sleep loss and substance abuse create potent recipe for college depression." JAMA 294 (18): 2177-2181.
Beck, A. T., Steer, R. A., & Brown, G. (1996). Beck Depression Inventory-II. Retrieved August 18, 2011from EBSCOhost.
Clinical depression, which affects about 10% of the adult population (Holtz, Stokes, 1138), is charact...
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High risk students showed greater support, quicker processing, and enhanced recall of negative depression-relevant adjectives involving incompetence, worthlessness, and low motivation (Alloy, Abramson, Francis, 1999). For these issues, the counseling center should have a support group for students. Often when a person is depressed, it feels more comfortable to retreat into one’s shell, but being around other people will make a person feel less depressed. To prevent depression, being with peers dealing with the same situations in college can go a very long way in reducing a sense of isolation and worthlessness. Support groups can also give confidence to one another, give and receive guidance on how to cope, and share college experiences.
Starting college can be a stressful time for any adolescent. For students suffering from depression it can be a traumatic experience. Worlds feel turned upside down. Even for those who manage to “cope,” pressures can cause these students to feel overwhelmed.
Nancy D. Brener and Lisa Cohen Barrios from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Sohela Sabur Hassan from the University of Texas at Houston conducted this experiment to see what percentage of college undergraduate students had contemplated suicide within the past 12 months. A survey was sent to a nationally representative sample of undergraduate students to assess the correlation between substance abuse and suicidal ideation. This was the first study to examine such behavior of a nationally representative sample.
4 Giancola, J.K., Grawitch, M.J., and Borchert, D. (2009). Dealing with the stress of college: A
Leahy, R. (2010, October 30). The Cost of Depression. Retrieved April 16, 2011, from www.huffingtonpost.com Web site: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-leahy-phd/te-cost-of-depression_b_770875.html
Why suicide? Why is it becoming a more common escape method from the academic, financial, and transitional burdens put on college students? Depression and suicides among college students make more headlines than the more familiar problems of drinking and vandalism that occur on campus. Suicides are a dramatic way to relieve stress or depression. Although suicides are fairly rare, they still account for the third leading cause of deaths of individuals raging from 15-24 years of age (Suicide Rates and the Troubling Economy.) There are many reasons why these mental health problems are on the rise and why they will continue to occur (Depression, Suicide Rising among College Students.)
Depression was once believed to affect mainly adults for various reasons. It was hardly ever seen in minors or college students. Today depression is more common in younger populations mainly college students. There are many things that can trigger depression in college students, such as the environment, anxiety, and the fear of failure. All these things can contribute to depression in college students and sometimes cannot be seen. Many college students will never seek help, and many wont ever admit that they struggle with it.
Roth, Mark. "Teen Depression More Common Than Many Think." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. 18 Dec. 2013: A.1. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 21 Apr. 2014. .
As it has been proven, students and depression across campuses are becoming more common daily, and it must be taken as a serious matter. There are many causes that result in depression, such as personal stress and academic stress. This severely influences a student’s life and can bring about extreme negative outcomes like suicide or eating disorders. Luckily, there are cures for this major issue. Counseling centers and mentors in the classroom and in residence halls can impact a student’s overall well-being and attitude towards his or her daily life. Depression, in conclusion, is an extremely dangerous mental illness that, if not cured with the correct treatments, could become detrimental to students across the globe.
... suicide help phone line and on campus psychologists. But just to be more cautious, all the students in college should know more about the growing and serious epidemic of suicide. Students should put up flyers informing them on the subject of suicide and like any other societies they should have fundraisers to raise money in creating suicide help line and psychiatric offices for college students off campus. Be aware of their environment and inform any sign of suicide among their peers so that they can immediately get help before it gets too late. It depends on individual, some college students manage to survive and even flourish under the most difficult circumstances, while others flounder under the same conditions.
Kessler, Chiu . et. al."The Numbers Count: Mental Disorders in America."NIMH RSS. National Institute of Mental Health , n.d. Web. 23 Apr. 2014.
Mounsey.R, Vendehey.M, Diekhoff.G. (2013). Working and non-working university students: anxiety, depression and grade point average. College Student Journal, 47.2, 379-380.