Depressed and in denial

Anxious college students have been in the news since UCLA’s annual self-reported mental health survey was published a few weeks ago. Researchers and journalists offer numerous putative causes for our depression and anxiety, including the economy, a sense of social responsibility associated with political change, social isolation, and, perhaps ironically, media overstimulation. Closer to home, the Furman Counseling Center at Barnard cites “stress” as students’ most common complaint. These discussions belie the fact that stress, anxiety, and some forms of depression are reflective of our own coping skills and only indirectly of the external factors that prompted them.

Proposing that a student is stressed out because of the economy has the ridiculous implication that the economy will have to improve before the student can feel better. In the press, reports on psychological studies tend to emphasize how very out of their hands students’ mental health is, but with the increasing reliability of well-researched coping tactics that can often be self-taught, the reverse is true. For Slate Magazine, Taylor Clark points out that the commonness of anxiety in today’s population (at 18 percent, the U.S. is the world’s most anxious nation) has an upside: An unprecedented wealth of resources are available to help us cope with that stress.

Freud fought a difficult battle for the mentally ill, insisting that they were not to be feared or ostracized, and he became the forerunner of a continuum view of mental health. Unfortunately, the vestiges of that stigma, which separates mental health from mental illness, have led to a Catch-22 in student health: If we admit that something is wrong, we can unwittingly commit to self-perpetuating therapy or medication for a behavior that could have been fixed through lifestyle modification. If we don’t seek treatment, we associate guilt and shame with our negative emotions or pretend to ignore them entirely, which, especially in the case of mood disorders, can make symptoms worse. This month, a set of studies by Jordan et al. highlighted the latter situation with the phenomenon of social comparison: “People may think they are more alone in their emotional difficulties than they really are.” Although we are more communicative than before thanks to social networking, which seems to relieve stress, we also feel pressured to put our best foot forward, and so we make light of issues that bother us deeply or avoid discussing issues that make us uncomfortable. Shared concerns about settling into college and, later, making arrangements for life after college are often trivialized in Facebook exchanges. We also tend to glamorize our stress, ridiculing our workload and making comments about having a college life outside academic commitments while taking on even more work.

Although professional guidance should always be sought for serious psychological illness or impairment, smaller behaviors that lead to mood problems associated with stress, anxiety, time management, and sleeping patterns should neither be ignored nor pathologized. Distress and impairment are the criteria for diagnosing a mood disorder, but we can be distressed or impaired by behaviors that don’t merit a diagnosis. Research-backed coping skills, underemphasized by the media and school systems, have flourished in recent years, and students can fruitfully take advantage of them. Cognitive behavioral therapy, for example, sees behavior modification as a three-step process: identifying problem behaviors, collecting information about what reinforces them, and taking gradual steps toward eliminating them. In addition to the tried and true nutrition, exercise, and meditation, psychological studies focused on wellness have found that a sense of religious community and a set of stable and stimulating relationships can alleviate anxiety. It seems that the particular senses of failure that lead to anxiety among college students are often associated with self-regulation: lateness, a loss of focus, or regrets about poor judgment. In a 2010 study titled “I Forgive Myself, Now I Can Study,” Wohl et al. found higher test scores among procrastinators who chose to devote their self-berating energy to studying for their next exam. Problem behaviors are often a symptom of our lifestyle at large, and we shouldn’t expect to become different people when preparing for an exam than when finding a way to relax that’s still engaging. Bill Watterson pointed out in a speech that “we are never taught to recreate constructively … but the mind is like a car battery; it recharges by running.”

Pryor et al.’s UCLA study found another, less popularized phenomenon: A “record number” of anxious college students now see greater earning potential as the chief benefit of attending college. The loss of the intrinsic value of education is poignant, but to some extent, anxiety is adaptive. It further motivates us toward our goals, provided that our goals are our own, and it encourages introspection, provided we don’t sink into self-pity. Acknowledging loneliness or maladjustment today is almost as difficult as communicating these feelings to a society that avoids them. In ignoring that part of ourselves, we are mirroring the fear and estrangement we once imposed on the seriously mentally ill, isolating ourselves from ourselves as well as from one another.

Zeba Ahmad is a Barnard College junior majoring in psychology and philosophy. Any Road Will Take You There runs alternate Thursdays.