Friday, May 1, 2015

Literature Review 5

1.

2.
Tinto, Vincent.
Vincent Tinto’s Leaving College : Rethinking the Causes and Cures of Student Attrition. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1987. N. pag.print.

3. This book is a detailed exploration of the many reasons students choose to drop out of school. This goes through every possible explanation for the drop-out rates and offers some prevention methods as well as methods on how to make students feel more welcome. The big point is that the main reason college students leave college is because of a lack of adequate social interaction and connectivity with their school.
4. Vincent Tinto is a professor of Education and Sociology at Syracuse University. This book is widely read and recognized and has gotten many awards. There is extensive information about him here: http://soe.syr.edu/about/member.aspx?fac=64
5. Key Terms:
1. Leavers: This refers to the students who eventually drop out of college. 
2. Persisters: Refers to the students who overcome all of the adversary factors and graduate college

6. Quotes:
1.  “The absence of sufficient contact with other members of the institution proves to be the single most important predictor of eventual departure” (56).
2. “Many isolates relied more heavily on high school friends, family, or friends from work. Over time it grew more unlikely that these women would form friendships on campus” (110).
3. “Voluntary leavers were much less likely than were persisters to identify someone on campus with whom they had a significant relationship and or served as a significant definer of their actions” (56).

7. This book is important as one of the main components of my paper is the effect of social isolation on low-income college students' mental health and success in college. It provides a framework for just how influential social interaction and a sense of belonging is in every students' experience in college. Tinto just puts social isolation and its effect on mental health into perspective by his assertion that it is the single most important indicator in whether or not a student will complete college.

Final Blog: Why Low-Income College Students are at risk for Depression

Abstract:

This paper is a speculative piece on how depression in college is not only a common occurrence but that it is more likely to occur in certain populations of students. This paper focuses on low-income college students and the factors which make them more susceptible to depression in college. Firstly, it explore why college is a harmful mental health environment for everyone and comprises of quotes from other scholars who study college depression. It then launches into the fact that college is set up against those who are not wealthy enough to afford college without crippling loans and debt and how this instills an unease in lower-income students. This leads to financial strain, social isolation, and risk for drop-out from school. Becker, who believes stress is a myth that we have latched on to in order to avoid facing bigger, more systematic issues. The paper concludes with ideas to help prepare low-income students for what awaits them in college and programs/ideas to sustain their resilience while in school in order for them to succeed against the odds.


Bibliography:

Armstrong, Elizabeth and Laura Hamilton. Paying for the Party:
How College Maintains Inequality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2013. Print
Aselton, Pamela.
"Sources Of Stress And Coping In American College Students Who Have Been Diagnosed With Depression." Journal Of Child & Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing 25.3 (2012): 119-123. Academic Search Premier. Web. 3 Mar. 2015.
Becker, Dana.
“Does ‘Stress’ Hide Deeper Social Problems?”  One Nation under Stress: The Problem with Stress as an Idea.  Oxford UP, 2013.
Davis, Dannielle. Warfield, Markeba. (2011) The Importance of Networking in the Academic and Professional Experiences of Racial Minority Students in the USA, Educational Research and Evaluation: An International Journal on Theory and Practice, 17:2, 97-113, DOI:10.1080/13803611.200.597113
Klibert, Jeffrey, et al.
"Resilience Mediates The Relations Between Perfectionism And College   Student Distress." Journal Of Counseling & Development 92.1 (2014): 75-82. Academic Search Premier. Web. 24 Feb. 2015.’
Mounsey, Rebecca, Michael A. Vandehey, and George M. Diekoff.   
"Working And Non-Working University Students: Anxiety, Depression, And Grade Point Average." College Student Journal 47.2 (2013): 379-389. Academic Search Premier. Web. 3 Mar. 2015.
Narduzzi, Arianna. The Creative Process, Suicide Research. retrieved from: https://ariannanarduzzicas110.wordpress.com/
Serido, Joyce, et al. "Financial Adaptation Among College Students: Helping Students Cope With Financial Strain." Journal Of College Student Development 3 (2014): 310. Project MUSE. Web. 30 Apr. 2015.
Tinto, Vincent. Vincent Tinto’s Leaving College : Rethinking the Causes and Cures of Student Attrition. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1987. N. pag.print.
Walsemann, Katrina M., Gilbert C. Gee, and Danielle Gentile. "Sick Of Our Loans: Student Borrowing And The Mental Health Of Young Adults In The United States." Social Science & Medicine 124.(2015): 85-93. ScienceDirect. Web. 30 Apr. 2015.
This paper can be found at:



Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Research post 9

Counter argument:

My argument for this paper was one of why lower SES college students are at a high risk for depression. I focused on the idea as a whole so one of my resources, Jeffrey Kilbert et al's, "Resilience Mediates The Relations Between Perfectionism And College  Student Distress" the focus is on an individual's level of resilience and ability to deal with stressful situations. I believe resilience does play a role in depression in college students to a certain extent. However, Dana Becker's ideas in "“Does ‘Stress’ Hide Deeper Social Problems?” gave me a completely different viewpoint. The system of Education itself is to blame and its unfair that Education has become another disadvantage for the poor. Why should they be exposed to this high depression- risk environment in the first place? So in keeping with her idea that a system-wide change needs to occur, I settled on a happy medium. The school should have a responsibility to provide mental health services as well as networking opportunities for all of its students so as to rectify the -as of now- myth of equality for all classes by way of Education and hard work.

Monday, April 6, 2015

Research Blog #8

Interview:

I've interviewed my roommate, Kali. She has experience with depression and I felt like her viewpoint was well-needed in writing this paper. She is a low income student who works part time on the weekends. I needed some kind of solid confirmation that there was something about college that had the potential to create depression in young students or to make it worse in those already suffering from it. In the case of my roommate, she was already diagnosed with depression and the environment of college as well as the pressures to do well, while being financially responsible for herself was a heavy burden to bear. A lot of what I wrote about is only inference from what I know of depression and its symptoms. Some interesting quotes:

1. When did you first start to experience symptoms of depression? K: When I was 16. It was Constant sadness and mood swings. I couldn’t eat when I was depressed. I ate too much when I was stressed.  

2.
What was your experience with depression in college? K: Being depressed all the time I felt like I couldn’t handle stress would get overwhelmed by the smallest things. I felt like I couldn’t talk to anyone about what was going on. And it seemed like everything was happing at once, causing deeper depression.
3. Do Feel like it affected your work? K:  Yes for first two years It negatively affected my grades. They went down and I felt like they couldn’t go back up.
4. How did you cope with depression? K: Crying, Drinking wine, Alienated myself.
5. Do you think your depression got worse in college? K: Yes it got worse this year. Why? Me constantly comparing myself to others. I felt like I wasn’t where I needed to be. I felt like I was behind and I wouldn’t get to where I wanted to be.
This may not seem like much, but so much can be inferred from this interview from her. Depression may be an individual issue of a person who lacks resilience or it may be a systematic issue that could affect anyone's mental state negatively.
 
 

Monday, March 30, 2015

Research Blog 7 "Case"

My main example is  "Paying For the Party" by Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton right now. I really like the idea of the social class breakdown and how even subtle differences in class status can still cause a major difference in outcome of the worth of going to college in the first place. Paying for the Party outlines why privatized universities are so harmful for working class students of average intelligence (for that particular university) who expect to experience a big change in their socioeconomic status after attaining a degree from one of these schools. This book tells us that these colleges accept the working class students into their schools but that they really stand to benefit wealthy students from which they can also benefit from in a reciprocal fashion. From here I take minor research from other articles to frame the big picture: Working Class students who wish to experience upward mobility on the "professional pathway" are likely to experience stressors which can lead to depression.

Research Blog #6 visual

This graph is a good illustration of the trend of increasing mental health concerns each year in students. It also shows just how common these mental health disturbances are and that these are only the cases that sought out help. This suggests that there are likely more unknown cases of mental health issues.

Monday, March 23, 2015

Literature Review 4

1. Pamela Aselton, "Sources of Stress and Coping in American College Students who Have Been Diagnosed With Depression"


2.
Aselton, Pamela.
 "Sources Of Stress And Coping In American College Students Who Have Been       Diagnosed With Depression." Journal Of Child & Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing 25.3 (2012): 119-123. Academic Search Premier. Web. 3 Mar. 2015.
3. This piece is a Psychology study on college aged students. The research method conducted here was to survey the students about their preferred way of coping with stress and the most common/influential causes of that stress. This study gets into what about the college environment it is that causes such high stress as well as the unhealthy ways students deal with such as drug use, binge drinking etcetera.
4. The author, Pamela Aselton has information provided on ResearchGate with many of her achievements and qualifications listed publicly as most of these researchers do. She has a PHD and is employed at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in the School of Nursing. She has 21 publications on research gate and so I deem her to be a pretty good source on the topic of stress and its effects.
5. Sources of stress- issues/ factors that caused college students noticeable distress. These included: Roommate Problems, Academic Troubles, Financial and Career Concerns,  and Family Pressures (121).
Coping Methods-things students did to better handle the stress caused by the above. These methods included: Journaling, Marijuana, Music, Talk Therapy, Physical Activities and many more (122).
6. Quotes:
1. "Depression has increasingly been diagnosed in the college age population, with the American College Health Association reporting that 16% of all college students suffer from depression at some point in their college years" (119).
2. "College students are functioning in increasingly competitive environments with fewer job opportunities at graduation, which may increase their stress level and lead to feelings of depression" (119).
3. "This survey found that one in four college students admitted to using marijuana within the last year" (122).

7. I think this study could contribute nicely to my topic as it gives me some evidence of the point I am trying to make especially that of my point that new cases of depression are being increasingly diagnosed. The stress factors could be an entire paragraph of my paper as I really want to get into what specifically about college is so stressful as to induce/ worsen depression. This study gives me a frame for that purpose.





Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Blog Post 5: Bibliography


Working Bibliography

Armstrong, Elizabeth and Laura Hamilton. Paying for the Party:

 How College Maintains Inequality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2013. Print

Aselton, Pamela.

"Sources Of Stress And Coping In American College Students Who Have Been       Diagnosed With Depression." Journal Of Child & Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing 25.3 (2012): 119-123. Academic Search Premier. Web. 3 Mar. 2015.

Becker, Dana.

“Does ‘Stress’ Hide Deeper Social Problems?”  One Nation under Stress: The Problem with Stress as an Idea.  Oxford UP, 2013.

 

Klibert, Jeffrey, et al.

"Resilience Mediates The Relations Between Perfectionism And College   Student Distress." Journal Of Counseling & Development 92.1 (2014): 75-82. Academic Search Premier. Web. 24 Feb. 2015.’

Geisner, Irene, Markman, Kimberly Mallett, and Jason, R. Kilmer.

"An Examination Of Depressive Symptoms And Drinking Patterns In First Year College Students." Issues In Mental Health Nursing 33.5 (2012): 280-287. CINAHL with Full Text. Web. 24 Feb. 2015.

Lamis, Dorian, A., and Danielle, R. Jahn.

"Parent–Child Conflict And Suicide Rumination In College Students: The Mediating Roles Of Depressive Symptoms And Anxiety Sensitivity." Journal Of American College Health 61.2 (2013): 106-113. CINAHL with Full Text. Web. 24 Feb. 2015.

Mounsey, Rebecca, Michael A. Vandehey, and George M. Diekoff.   

"Working And Non-Working University Students: Anxiety, Depression, And Grade Point Average." College Student Journal 47.2 (2013): 379-389. Academic Search Premier. Web. 3 Mar. 2015.

Blog Post 4: Research Proposal


Depression in College Students

Topic:

In this paper I will discuss depression in college students and some of the risk-factors for depression and some of its effects in students, for example suicide and failing in school. I want to take this idea of depression in college students and connect it to how privatization affects students’ mindsets and instills in them an overachieving and overcritical attitude that can be detrimental to their mental health.

Research Question:

            Does the Privatization of Education put students at risk for depression and other mental health issues or are most of these students lack already fated to develop these disorders because of a lack of resilience?

Theoretical Frame:

            A really important idea that I will include in this paper would be that of resilience. Jeffrey Klibert’s “Resilience Mediates the Relations Between Perfectionism and College Student Distress” focuses on the idea that resilience is the key to distress in college students caused by an insistence on perfection drilled into them from various angles. Klibert lists three different types of perfectionism: Self-oriented Perfectionism, Other-oriented Perfectionism, and Socially Prescribed Perfectionism. Klibert reports from the study on resilience found that “Self-Oriented Perfection and socially Prescribed Perfectionism were associated with greater self-reports of depression and anxiety…notably, Socially Prescribed Perfectionism had stronger relations with both depression and anxiety” (Klibert 79). Klibert then acknowledges that resilience has a role in reducing risk of depression and anxiety but that there are obviously more factors at play. The goal of this paper is to ascertain if the level of depression in college students has raised since before the privatization of education or if other factors are more to blame. Regardless, I want to explore the connect between privatization and how it can potentially affect college students and spark a rise in depression and anxiety if it already has not.

Case:

Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton’s, Paying for the Party brought up some interesting risk factors for depression and overall decrease in wellbeing that they did not really expand upon. In the first chapter, there are a few offhand comments about some isolated students becoming depressed in direct opposition to the flourishing social butterflies in what they termed as “The Vampire Effect”. The book also mentions the high-stakes atmosphere college becomes when students are not from an upper class family as they are literally counting on college to survive later on or experience an “upward mobility”. I want to then take this idea of highly stressful, really demanding environment and combine it with an article, “An Examination of Depressive Symptoms and Drinking Patterns in First Year College Students” which expands upon the aforementioned issues Armstrong and Hamilton merely hint at. This article explores various symptoms of depression, its many causes, and the faulty ways in which college students cope with these symptoms. Branching from this idea, I would then connect everything to Jeffrey Klibert’s article, “Resilience Mediates the Relations Between Perfectionism and College Student Distress”. Finally, I want to include a discussion of Dana Becker’s “Does ‘Stress’ Hide Deeper Problems?”. This book/article takes an interesting look into how we have changed what stress means and how we have essentially let it take over our lives. Our new definition of stress demands, “Change yourself, change your lifestyle, or learn to adapt to stress” (Becker 2013). This cannot possibly be good for one’s mental health and furthermore it can connect to resilience and the question of whether we have become over sensitive to everyday stressors. So far, these are my main sources of ideas as far as the direction of this paper as they are connected in a domino effect. I really want to get into how depression has increased in recent years as a result of students’ inability to keep up with the demands of college eventually but I lack the sources for now.  I also want to have specific sources about how college affects mental health, meaning its effect on those already diagnosed with mental illness and how many are diagnosed in college. I want to touch upon suicide as well and potential preventative methods to combat this issue.

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Literature Review 3

1. Dana Becker. "Does 'Stress' Hide Deeper Social Problems"



2. Becker, Dana. "Does 'Stress' Hide Deeper Social Problems?" TIME Magazine (March 13, 2013) Print and Web. 23 March 2015. Available online at http://ideas.time.com/2013/03/13/does-stress-hide-deeper-social-problems/

3. This book is about the current attitude of many people in the United States towards stress. It basically elaborates on the idea that we give "stress" too much of an influence, too much power. Also we take stress and individualize it rather than recognize that the stress is a universal problem with universal consequences.

4. Dana Becker has a PHD in social work and is a professor at Bryn Mawr College. She has written two other books dealing with mental health so she seems a brilliant authority on the subject.

5. Key Terms:  Today's Stress-"now a protean concept whose shape-shifting properties give it tremendous versatility as a vehicle for explaining human dilemmas" (Becker 2013).
Original Stress- refers to "flight or fight" response, coined by Walter Cannon, founding father of stress research. (Becker 2013).
                       
6. Quotes: "It's feeling stressed that causes our problems, not the situations and conditions that make us feel 'stressed out' in the first place" (Becker, 3). "As people who live a 'more stressful life' in a 'community that produces high stress hormones in people' then we're more likely to offer them psychotherapy or lifestyle advice and less likely to confront the societal problems of economic inequality and neighborhood violence" (Becker 4).  "There's no amount of counseling, Kale, or yoga-even if these were available or affordable to everyone in the U.S.-that would alter the economic, political, and social forces that sustain poverty or war in the age of terrorism or...'work-family conflict'" (Becker).
7. This book should prove interesting as I believe it gives me the bigger picture I need to make my point about mental health. I think the idea of addressing the systems that cause the distress (which can lead to depression) instead of treating the resulting depression can easily be connected to Privatism and the aspects of it that are depression risk-factors. It is a neat idea Becker brings up by saying that the unfair, stressful situations are covered by depicting people as not strong enough or individually ill when it is the unfair systems that are "ill".

Monday, March 2, 2015

Literature Review # 2

1.
This is Jeffrey Klibert, main contributor to the article at hand.

2. Klibert, Jeffrey, et al. "Resilience Mediates The Relations Between Perfectionism And College Student Distress." Journal Of Counseling & Development 92.1 (2014): 75-82. Academic Search Premier. Web. 24 Feb. 2015.

3. This article is reporting on a study on resilience and how the presence or lack of it contributes to a disrupt of college students mental health or the preservation of their mental health. Klibert discusses the unhealthy correlation between perfectionism and distress and how resilience can help to lessen the distress. 413 undergraduate college students from a variety of backgrounds were given a survey worded to determine perfectionism and the levels of distress presumably as a result. The results suggest that resilience eases the distress students under "Socially prescribed perfectionism" but not really the other two. After all of the data and evidence for his claims, this article ends with suggestions for psychologists to use in helping college students struggling with anxiety and depression.

4. Jeffrey Klibert is a professor at Georgia Southern University in the College of Liberal arts and Sciences.  He has a profile on Research Gate which lists 8 of his works. His topics of Psychology are Suicide Prevention and Identity. One of his co-writers on this article is featured in my previous literature review so I'm confident of his competence in this area. http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jeffrey_Klibert

5. Key Terms:
a. Self Oriented Perfectionism- Setting high standards for one's self  (75)
b. Other Oriented Perfectionism- Setting others to strict high standards (76)
c. Socially Prescribed Perfectionism- The belief that other's expectations are unnaturally high for one's individual behavior (76)
d. Resilience-"flexible set of attitudes that helps individuals successfully navigate through acute or chronic adversities" (76)

6. Important/ Interesting Quotes
"The inability to achieve balance among these demands often precipitates long-term emotional and behavioral maladjustment" (Gall, Evans, & Bellerose, 2000 p 75)
"Promoting resilience skills that help students navigate challenging achievement-oriented and social tasks may be an important initial step in thwarting the development of perfectionistic, depressive, and anxious traits." (80)
"Enriching interpersonal resources through resilience-building exercises enables clients to engage in positive emotions even in response to stress-generating circumstances" (80)

7. Value of this article?
I expect that this article will have a small but significant role in my project. I really want to tie it together with some of the readings in class, particularly my favorite, "Paying for the Party" by Laura Hamilton and Elizabeth Armstrong. There are a lot of points about how stressful college can be and I think this study on perfectionism and resilience will fit in nicely with the points Armstrong and Hamilton make. Also I like some of the implications for how to maybe combat this "distress: caused by perfectionism which I believe to be worsened by privatization. I want to make a nice big domino effect stemming from Privatization and this article/study is a perfect starting point.

Sunday, March 1, 2015

Literature Review #1

1.


These are the authors of the article I wish to review titled, "Parent-Child Conflict and Suicide Rumination in College Students: The Mediating Roles of Depressive Symptoms and Anxiety Sensitivity". The authors are Danielle R. Jahn and Dorian A. Lamis respectively.

2. Lamis, Dorian, A., and Danielle, R. Jahn. "Parent–Child Conflict And Suicide Rumination In College Students: The Mediating Roles Of Depressive Symptoms And Anxiety Sensitivity." Journal Of American College Health 61.2 (2013): 106-113. CINAHL with Full Text. Web. 24 Feb. 2015.

3. Summary: this article focuses on the rise of suicide in college students and outlines some of the causes and effects of depression. It is essentially a report on a experiment to find possible correlations among several risk factors and symptoms of depression and to interpret the results of this procedure. This particular article's results focus mainly on parent-child conflict and the role this conflict plays in the presence of depressive/ anxiety symptoms.
4. Danielle R. Jahn has a Master's in Psychology and is a research assistant at Texas Tech University in the Suicide and Depression Research Clinic of the Psychology Department. She has contributed to numerous Psychology articles in scholar journals with a focus on suicide and depression. Here is her Research gate Page with more information: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Danielle_Jahn
 Dorian A. Lamis has a PHD in Psychology and extensive experience. He was employed at East Tennessee State University, The University of South Carolina, and currently is an assistant professor at Emory University in the department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. Dorian has written at least 69 articles on over 20 different subjects in Psychology. Here is his page on Research gate: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Dorian_Lamis/publications

5. Key terms:
Anxiety Sensitivity: defined as "sensitivity to the physical and emotional symptoms of anxiety and the belief that these symptoms may result in severe somatic, social, and/or psychological consequences" (107).
Suicide rumination- Lamis and Jahn define this as "thinking about suicide ideation, suicide attempts, suicide and death" (106).

6.
a. "Suicide ideation data indicate that some students may have such great difficulty in college that they begin to think about suicide" (107)
b. "broad familial difficulties (eg poor relationships with parents, conflict between parents) have been linked to suicide ideation in college students" (107).
c. "When college students present for mental health services , assessing for parent-child conflict in addition to standard psychological symptoms and distress can inform suicide risk assessments and reduce the incidence of suicide on college campuses" (111).

7. This article should be helpful to my topic as it takes what seems like common sense and makes it more scientifically factual and more true that way. This study presents readers with some risk factors and then gives them evidence to support the hypothesized factors. This should fit nicely into my argument of Privatization and its effect on Parent-child conflict in college students!

Monday, February 23, 2015

Blog Post #3

As previously stated my topic of choice is how mental health and the college experience relate and affect one another. That being said I think privatization has a significant role as it could certainly affect one's mental health negatively. This is evidenced in Laura Hamilton and Elizabeth Armstrong's several times but most specifically with "As the year progressed, those who were not included became quieter (we were worried that one was becoming clinically depressed)...dominants absorb energy from subordinates, while subordinates become depressed, resigned, and passive"  (Armstrong, Hamilton 105-106). The point of this quote is that the experience of college can negatively or positively affect one's mental health depending on what end of the spectrum they fall, meaning dominant or subordinate. The privatization of college has the potential to pressure students that are already suffering from mental disorders or it has the potential to create disorders. This paper will likely focus on how privatization negatively attributes to students' mental health.

Monday, February 16, 2015

. Research Blog #2

Blog #2

1. Since Blog post number one, my topic choice has remained the same. I am absolutely committed to  the research of how mental health, good or bad, affects the college experience. I will probably focus on mental illness and how people cope with mental illness, academics, and a social life in comparison to "normal" students.
2. Interesting material seems to come up with the terms, "Mental Illness and College" Various resources come up, mostly talking about what illnesses are most common in college. There is a lot of talk about depression as the most common mental illness. With the key terms "Mental Health and college", many of the resources are about screening for mental illness in college students. Both seem to bring up really similar results. Finally "Resources for college students with mental Illnesss", brings up resources on how to help the struggling students.
3. Upon searching "mental illness on google", I came across many promising resources. There's an article titled, "How to Deal With Mental Illness in College" http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2014/03/26/learn-how-to-deal-with-mental-illness-in-college. This could be a good starting point on resources available to those with mental illness or even solution options.

There was also Mental Illness: a Hot Topic on College Campuses http://www.mainlinetoday.com/Main-Line-Today/October-2014/Mental-Illness-A-Hot-Topic-on-College-Campuses/. This is another resource on the ways mental illness affects college students.

Another good resource would be "How Colleges Flunk Mental Health" http://www.newsweek.com/2014/02/14/how-colleges-flunk-mental-health-245492.html. This article deals with the commonness of suicidal thoughts in college students and how mental health services help this or fail to help.

In the news articles, there are mostly studies of how college student's overall mental health has been steadily decreasing. The books that seem most promising are:
 1. College of the Overwhelmed: The Campus Mental Health Crisis and What to do About it by R Kadison and TF Digeronimo.
2. Mental Health of College Students and Their Non-College Attending Peers by Blanco. This one seems to be the bread and butter of the point I want to make.
3.D. Eisenberg's Mental Health Problems and Help-Seeking Behavior Among College Students

4. The resources I found just helped to solidify my interest in my topic as they seem to confirm that there is a problem with mental illness and the way it is dealt with in a college setting. I really want to dig into the effects of mental illness, focusing on the stigma, juggling the workload, dealing with the many stressors of college, and trying to have a social life on top of everything.
6. I have yet to see any counter argument for my topic as it seems to be a relatively recent topic. Mental illness is often hushed in college and students often suffer in silence. People seem to think that many of the common symptoms for mental illness, mostly depression, are normal for college students. The rise of suicides in colleges have people paying attention and taking mental health serious now. It is important that people be informed of mental illness and how common it is in college as well as that there be resources available to students.

Monday, February 9, 2015

Mental Health and College

Being a Psychology major, I am mostly interested in mental health and how it relates to the college experience. I want to research the most common mental illnesses college students experience, as well as which ones may be caused by college. I will then probably discuss the resources available to students to combat these problems. I want this paper to be an overall awareness to the importance of a well state of being inside and out.