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By Adrian Pascua
By Adrian Pascua
College students diagnosed with depression has risin 56 percent in the last six years. The ones that feel it the most are college students who are often homesick and sad.
Mostly the ones that have lived sheltered lives and have left the “comfort zone” of their old lives, forcing them into adulthood and leaving them to make their own decisions.
When someone is diagnosed depression then they lack the ability to function, lose the ability to stay asleep and are robbed of their energy and the ability to concentrate.
Those college students who don’t know that they have been diagnosed with depression usually turn to alcohol to cope with their “sadness.”
Depression negatively impacts memory and appetite, those who are depressed are not always withdrawn, but can also be angry or aggressive.
According to the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University in 2003, alcohol dependent individuals are almost 4 times more likely to have a major depressive disorder than someone who is not dependent.
For most college students, alcohol can seem like a desirable escape, but only add to the problem, due to the fact that alcohol is a depressant.
Those of us who have friends that are depressed don’t tend to notice because they refuse to admit that they have a problem and will hide behind a fake smile and a bottle of anti-depressants.
From personal experience, when someone starts to take any mood varying drug, they tend to end up becoming dependant upon that “magical pill.”
Rationalizing that they need to use the drug to have their moods set to a “normal” state.
I remember the year my friend was about to graduate from Dartmouth University in New Hampshire.
She had just broke up with her boyfriend and been running out of people to call, when she ran down her list of numbers and my name popped up.
Luckily, I had been up at 4 am, because I was running from my own depression, but that’s another story. She was in tears and across the country and there was nothing I could do.
Weeks on end she called me, until one day she tells me that she’s going to start taking anti-depressants to cope.
Of course this is where this story ends, but depression among college students doesn’t end there.
The numbers have just been rising in the last couple of decades.
Depression is not an easy thing to spot, but the only thing we can do, is look for it where we can.