Other stressors include social challenges (meeting new people, navigating a different type of social scene than high school) and anxiety about the future. The job market is much more uncertain than it was twenty or thirty years ago, and a college diploma is no guarantee of a career. Choosing a major is more than just deciding what you prefer to study in college; it could decide the course of your life and how successful you will be. Pretty serious stuff for an 18 or 19 year old to consider.
And then there's the partying. For many students, drinking is the method of choice for blowing off some steam, with four in five college students drinking and half of those doing what qualifies as binge drinking. The consequences this high a prevalence of drinking include 1,700 deaths of college students per year from alcohol-related unintentional injuries as well as hundreds of thousands of assaults, injuries and sexual assaults. College drinking is obviously nothing new, but some experts are concerned that some of this drinking is due to self-medication by students with depression and little support or education about the illness.
In addition, lack of sleep, a constant for most college students, can exacerbate unipolar depression and trigger mania in someone predisposed to bipolar depression.
The good news about depression among college students is that, for some, symptoms of depression may be a short-term reaction to one or more of the aforementioned stressors as opposed to full-blown clinical depression. In many cases, short-term therapy will be all that is needed things back on track. It is essential that it be treated, though, since short-term depression can evolve into a more permanent state if left untreated.
What are colleges doing about mental health on campus?
Colleges and universities are on the horns of a dilemma when it comes to students with mental illness issues, due to some new developments in the past few years.
While many schools have become more accessible to mentally ill students since the passage of the ADA, the high profile suicide of an Massachusetts Institute of Technology student and the subsequent lawsuit by her parents seems to have caused many schools to rethink that accessibility and accommodation. In April 2000 Elizabeth Shin committed suicide by setting herself on fire in her M.I.T. dorm room. Her parents filed a wrongful death lawsuit two years later claiming that M.I.T. was more concerned with Elizabeth's privacy than her wellbeing in failing to inform them of her deteriorating mental health and did not provide coordinated mental health care.
