St. Lawrence University resides in the foothills of the Adirondacks located at 44.5892° N, 75.1609° W in a rural town set in the North Country nestled up against the Canadian border. Once winter hits—it hits hard. Snow, freezing rain and below freezing temperatures are what we have become accustomed to.
The sun may not come out for days and when it does, it comes up at 8:00 a.m. and goes down by 4:00 p.m. A full eight hours. Students are in classes for the majority of those eight hours and when they get out, it is sunset.
There are not enough hours of sun in the day during the late fall and early spring semesters. It drains us as students and can lead to mental health problems in higher intensities such as SAD (seasonal affective disorder), anxiety and depression just to name a few.
This is a crisis. It is not just that the sun does not come out, even though that may seem like it. There is an ever growing mental health crisis on our campus and in our country. Areas like the North Country are hard pressed to locate adequate mental health care because locating providers is harder than finding a needle in a haystack. North Country residents do not have the access that we have to resources such as counseling, and a health center on St. Lawrence’s campus. Why is there still a mental health crisis on our campus, then? Does stigma play a role? Or what about available counselors in the health and counseling center?
Mental health has been a taboo in our society since when people were accused of being witches and burned at the stake for a so-called “hysteria”. That, since the Salem Witch Trials are an extreme, and later into history, may have made mental illnesses misunderstood and stigmatized to the point of death.
In modern day, however, we do not kill people for expressing signs of depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, OCD or schizophrenia. Instead, since childhood, our generation has been taught that it is a dirty little secret that should not be talked about out loud. People downplay the actual illness by saying and identifying people as “crazy” who have been depressed, have had anxiety attacks, for example, because people do not understand mental illness as being legitimate because it is invisible.
People may not go for help because we have been conditioned as a society to regard those with illnesses as weak, overreacting or dramatic. People are careless in how they speak with other people. Those in places of power at St. Lawrence, such as faculty and staff, have said problematic and insensitive things to myself and friends, even knowing that we have mental illnesses, or have experience with them, and yet nothing has been done about it.
I am writing as a fellow SLU student, and someone who lives in the area, as a call to end the mental health crisis. Give us more counselors, more events, like the Out of the Darkness Walk, that educate on mental health—the importance of it, the history of it, and how it affects every single one of us, whether you realize it now or not.
We are a community at St. Lawrence and we should look out for each other. Just like you would give someone a band aid for a cut, be considerate because you never know when someone may be hurting.