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.