Category Archives: Suicide

Ah, spring. The sun is shining, the temperatures are remotely higher than before and the amount of depressive episodes I face will hopefully decrease now that the weather is getting better. Yes, you read that correctly. My name is Maranda and I suffer from clinical depression and anxiety. I have days where getting out of bed is the hardest task I have to face that day and I struggle with getting through the day without letting my depression show. I put myself under immense pressure to be the best for everyone else, ignoring my needs. Turns out that I’m not alone. 44 percent of American college students experience symptoms of depression, according to Healthline Network. To make matters worse, 75 percent of college students do not seek help for those mental health problems, and young adults diagnosed with depression are five times more likely to attempt suicide than adults. Why do so many students neglect their mental health during some of their most important years in life? Is it because of the stigma society has put on mental issues? Is it the stubbornness of our generation, where admitting that we need help ultimately means that we are weak or a failure? Or is it the fear that our friends, family or classmates will judge us for having it? All three? If so, I get that. I’ve been there. It’s taken years of pent up emotions and a multitude of bad life experiences for me to finally walk into the Counseling Center and say those three dreadful words: “I need help.” It took two years to admit to my mother that I had once attempted suicide, while I was away at school. I was (and still am) afraid of what everyone in my life thought of me and of the decisions I make on a daily basis. If you’ve experienced that or something similar, I’m sure I know how you feel. But once I did seek help, the weight of the world has slowly been lifted off my shoulders.

Generally speaking, sweepingly pessimistic statements about society should be taken with a grain of salt. When someone claims pop music is getting much dumber, or college kids are much more prone to mental illness, odds are pretty good the claim in question is a bit overblown. Overall, we’re often more attuned to the negative stories and anecdotes than positive ones, meaning that news coverage of terrible events, for example, can cause us to develop a distorted view of things.

Sometimes, though, there are exceptions. And an interesting, under-discussed one involves young people and mental health. In short: Ever since the 1930s, young people in America have reported feeling increasingly anxious and depressed. And no one knows exactly why.

One of the researchers who has done the most work on this subject is Dr. Jean Twenge, a social psychologist at San Diego State University who is the author of Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before.She’s published a handful of articles on this trajectory, and the underlying story, she thinks, is a rather negative one. “I think the research tells us that modern life is not good for mental health,” she said.

A key thing to understand before diving into her argument is that there are important methodological obstacles to accurately gauging how the prevalence of anxiety and depression wax and wane over time. The words “depression” and “anxiety” themselves, after all, mean very different things to someone asked about them in 1935 as compared to 1995, so surveys that invoke these concepts directly only have limited utility for longitudinal study. To get around this, Twenge prefers to rely on surveys and inventories in which respondents are asked about specific symptoms which are frequently correlated with anxiety and depression (she said that there’s a lot of symptomological overlap between the two). Questions like “Do you have trouble falling asleep?” mean similar things in 1935 as compared to 1995.