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.

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.

 

 

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.

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.

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.