by Samantha Woo
As I was scrolling up and down my newsfeed on Facebook to distract myself from all the work I had on my plate, this Buzzfeed article caught my eye: 19 Picture That Sum Up How Absolutely Ridiculous It Is Finding a Job. Another silly Buzzfeed article, yes, but it was just enough to make me forget how stressed I was in my job/grad school application process. A little mental break was all I needed between being a DI athlete, having a social life, working multiple jobs and internships, schoolwork, and applying to graduate schools and jobs. Nowadays I seem to be juggling a lot and it reminded me a lot of a story I came across in the NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/ 08/02/education/edlife/stress- social-media-and-suicide-on- campus.html?_r=0) talking about the mental health situation on campus at the University of Pennsylvania and the suicide of a smart and beautiful track star, Madison Holleran. Outwardly she had what kids at Penn described as PennFace, the idea that even if you’re struggling or stressed, you put on a positive façade so no one can see that you’re struggling on the inside. By looking at Madison’s social media accounts, news outlets said you wouldn’t have been able to tell she was depressed or having any issues at all. A student the NYT article interviewed justified it by saying, “Nobody wants to be the one struggling while everyone else is doing great. Despite whatever’s going on — if you’re stressed, a bit depressed, if you’re overwhelmed — you want to put up this positive front”. I believe that in our society today there is a greater pressure on students and people of our generation to go the best colleges, to go to graduate school, to get the best jobs and to work to achieve perfection, but that isn’t realistic. With this growing pressure, the mental health issue needs to be better addressed, or else people end up coping in unhealthy ways and like Madison, could turn to suicide – and that’s just the reality of it all. Although Penn has started to take steps towards providing more services to students, it needs to be recognized that this isn’t just an issue on their campus. My high school finally has broached the subject of mental health and actually just started taking steps towards a new approach to combat the mental health issues we’ve had in our town, but personally, I’m not convinced that it’s been the best approach to the situation at hand (http://www.nj.com/mercer/ index.ssf/2015/10/high_levels_ of_stress_in_students_lead_to_ district.html). What they have decided to do is cut back on midterm and final exams and they’ve started to implement no homework days. I like the idea of the whole-child approach that they mention: “focusing on the social, emotional and academic development of students”, but I think that cutting back on exams, cutting gifted and talented classes, and creating these no homework days is setting students up for failure. I believe that these students will not be fully prepared for the real world and I think this is why it has a created an uproar among parents within the school district and has even gotten the attention of those at the NY Times whose article tried to paint the issue into a race problem and an issue of “tiger moms” or over-bearing parents, but that’s not really how I see it and I know other WW-P graduates would agree with me. I look back on my academic past and I think about how grateful I am for having been part of a top-tiered school district. My schedule was full of band and orchestra concerts, rowing competitions and practices, EMT shifts, as well as schoolwork. All of this made transitioning to Boston University for undergrad simple and smooth. I even recall my AP Bio class in high school being more difficult than the Bio class I had taken my freshman year in college. Being part of such a competitive high school atmosphere gave me the motivation to work harder and although sometimes I was overwhelmed and sometimes it felt like the world was going to end, it was never anything unmanageable and it had given me methods and tools to succeed. I also always had a support system of my friends and family by my side which psychologists would define as a protective factor against developing mental health disorders. An important thing to note is that not everyone is as lucky as me, which brings us back to my main point: the mental health stigma needs to be lifted and the issue needs to be put at the forefront of everyone’s agenda right now especially since depressive disorders are predicted, by the WHO, to be the largest contributor to global disease burden by 2030. People in general need to feel comfortable to reach out for help and mental needs to be a bigger conversation that is being held right now because not enough attention is being given to the issue.
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