Lights on Laurentians: I Just Want to Start Living: The Concerning Reality of Mental Illness in College
These stories are compiled from interviews with different St. Lawrence students on campus. Names have been changed for the privacy of the individuals. This piece discusses mental health and may be distressing to some readers.
“Yeah, I’m fine, Mom, just, like, end of semester stress, you know?”
Danny is sitting on his bed in his freshman single. The white tile floors reflect the harsh light of the single, circular overhead lamp. It’s mid-afternoon in April, but the blinds are closed. The trash can is overflowing with takeout containers from the Pub. On his desk, an oily scum is forming on the top of the leftover liquid in a styrofoam cup of ramen.
“No, I don’t really hang out with those guys anymore.” Danny didn’t know why he had called his mom that day. He never really felt like talking once she picked up. Then again, he hadn’t spoken to anyone else or even left his room for class all day. He doesn’t tell his mom about his grades, either.
“Yeah, I don’t know, we just don’t hang out much,” he says, his voice becoming sharp and defensive. “We just weren’t the same type of people, I guess. It’s not a big deal.”
He didn’t bother emerging from his room much anymore except on weekend nights. When his comments seemed out of place and nobody laughed, he drank. When everybody snorted at an inside joke and nobody answered when he asked for the story, he drank. When panic started to well in his chest and the walls felt like they were pressing in on him, he drank again.
Maybe he should quit drinking for a while. Maybe he should just get out there more. Get more exercise, get more sleep, get over it.
Still fine.
He didn’t hang out with them much anymore.
***
“We’ve been noticing some trends nationally, and over the decades, and even in the past five or ten years, there’s been more students coming to campus with existing mental health challenges,” explains Timothy Corbitt, Director of Health and Counseling Services at St. Lawrence University. He says the Health & Counseling Center wants to share their information and try to increase the dialogue about mental health concerns on campus.
A 2016 survey by the American College Health Association found that 52.7 percent of student participants reported frequently feeling that things were hopeless, and 39.1 percent reported feeling so depressed that it was difficult to function sometime during the past 12 months. An earlier survey by the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) found that 73 percent of the respondents had experienced a mental health crisis while in college. As a whole, these crises were triggered by extreme feelings of anxiety or panic about school and life, adjusting to a new routine, feelings of isolation, medication issues, or PTSD episodes caused by class content. Additionally, the survey found that most colleges were not aware of these crises.
Corbitt explains that nationally there has been a flip from depression as the no. 1 mental health concern among students to anxiety. More and more students are coming into the Health and Counseling Center for help with anxiety, he says, whether through counseling or medication. According to the NAMI, half of all chronic mental illness begins by age 14: three-quarters by age 24, right around high school and college age.
This can have a far-reaching impact on the daily lives of students on campus. “Students who are anxious have problems sleeping, and sometimes that affects their academics — usually, it can,” Corbitt says.
***
It’s 2 p.m. and Christina is still in bed. She can’t stay awake for more than three hours at a time, even after three cups of coffee, even in the middle of class.
The orange and white pill bottles line up on her bedside table: the one for bipolar II disorder, the one for depression, the one for severe anxiety triggered by the bipolar medication. That’s the one that causes her to fall asleep at any given time. Sleep, class, sleep, maybe squeeze in some homework, sleep. She takes some combination of the meds four or five times a day.
Her phone lights up on the table next to her: Zach wants to know if she’s going out tonight. Come over, we miss you. She’ll read it three hours later when she wakes up, and she’ll tell him she’s not up for it. If she could even stay awake the entire night, she’d just be anxious and miserable. What would be the point?
The only moments where she can get away from it all are in sleep — but somehow no matter how much she sleeps, she never wakes up feeling good about herself. She’s tried to go off her medication a few times, but it just trades the new symptoms out for the old ones.
“You have to feel it out,” she remembers the therapist at the Health and Counseling Center telling her. She would have to wait over a month to see somebody who could work with her to fix her medication. She knew she could call Security if she was feeling suicidal — but what was the point of being taken to the hospital or talked down, she thought, if nothing was going to be resolved?
The way they had spoken to her, it had just felt so — frustrating. Like it was all in her head when she knew it was a problem with her medication. Like she could just fix it on her own by going outside or talking to friends. Like she could just not be anxious. Like she wasn’t feeling like she was in hell right now.
***
Corbitt explains that the Health and Counseling Center has a psychiatrist who comes in three hours a week on Wednesday mornings, and that the nurse practitioners and physician’s assistants at the Center also prescribe medication. The counseling and clinical teams meet regularly to review cases as an integrated group, he says.
“Sometimes, particularly when it gets busy, you have to wait a week or more, but if things are urgent, if there’s a crisis, we’ll see the student for sure,” says Corbitt. He emphasizes that there is a process by which they respond to crises. He adds that while students may be deterred by the perception of a wait time, the Counseling Center will always work with them. “We’re a resource that’s here to our students; we have after-hours availability on call, and they can call the counselor on call. I’m not sure that everybody knows about that, and that students can walk into the center,” he adds.
NAMI says there are long delays — sometimes decades — between the first appearance of symptoms and when people get help. Health and Counseling Services has been working to spread awareness by going around and speaking to different groups from faculty to classrooms to athletics and making their presence known in orientation materials for new students. However, Corbitt says there is always room for improvement. “I think we could probably increase our activity, maybe more prevention-oriented, outside of the center — maybe getting into residence halls more,” he muses. Recently, there have been talks about working to make the Health & Counseling Center open for hours on weekends.
***
It’s 2 a.m. when Molly finds herself sitting on the floor of her room, crying. She did that now — slept all day and stayed up all night. She had been prescribed the wrong depression medication (again), her grades were suffering, she was in another unhealthy relationship, and suddenly, in this moment, she couldn’t take it all anymore — the crushing pressure of the culture, the workload, the interminable length of the road ahead. I don’t want to be alive anymore.
There are more than enough pills in the bottle on her desk to kill her if she takes them all, she thinks. Rolling the bottle in her hand, inspecting it: I wonder how long it would take anyone to realize. She hardly sees any of her old friends anymore. They’ve all joined different clubs without her, and never seem to have time for her. She has eaten by herself almost every day that week.
She tosses the bottle to the side and leans back against the wall. There is the sad truth: I don’t want to die; I just want to start living. But who knew how long that would even take? Her eyes are sticky with tears, but she’s just too weary to cry anymore She knew she should go to the Counseling Center again, and yet for some reason she never did. She told herself she would make an appointment; she did once, then skipped it.
She continues to sit, alone while surrounded by hundreds of people in the eerie quiet of the night.
Mental illness. It’s almost seen as a joke here. We make comments about trying to get hit by cars or offering to pay people to kill us. But where’s the joke in any of that… ?