Mental Health @ USC

Guest Blog by Kelly Martin ‘17

It seems that there’s only one accepted to story to tell about college students and mental health. You probably don’t have to think too much to guess the main points. since we hear them repeated again and again here at USC:

• we’re stressed out, overworked, and mentally fragile
• we need to raise awareness of mental illness
• we need to destigmatize mental illness
• we have a shortage of counseling services

And yes, these things are all important parts of the conversation around mental health. But all of these focus on illness, disease, infirmity – not on what we can do in our lives to thrive and live better. What’s worse, we as human beings naturally seek words and groups by which to define ourselves, and this fixation on the unwellness of our mental state restricts us to negative definitions of self. That, in turn, can leave us feeling like they’re our only options, that we have no other way to think about our mental health.

Surveys on the mental health of college students are often pathogenic, reporting more on measures of disease than on those of good health. As a student, I find this frustrating. I don’t deny that my peers and I feel stressed. Yes, we’re tired. Yes, we’re overwhelmed. And yes, the college environment can make us feel sad and anxious and isolated. But to say that we, as a student body, have a mental illness problem is a statement I resent, and with which I have real concern.

Pairing of frequency data on stress and suicidal thoughts, as reported annually by the American College Health Association (whose survey has been used for 15 years here at USC) gives us an incomplete picture of our student body and unfairly leads us to assume the worst about our mental health.

Let’s take a look at some 2013 ACHA data included in a Slate article from July 2015:

If you’re like me, something in particular about this data makes you do a double-take: the frequency of students that felt overwhelmed, sad, lonely, or anxious at some point in the past year is followed with frequency of suicidal thoughts. There’s an implication here that feeling overwhelmed or sad or lonely or anxious are necessarily within the same subset of human emotion as feeling suicidal. That’s extremely concerning. I, on the other hand, challenge you to question the narrative that you have been repeatedly told – that your stress makes you sick – and explore alternative possibilities:

Maybe we feel so tired because we don’t make sleep a priority. Maybe we feel so sad because we neglect exercise and so we don’t get our daily dose of endorphins. Maybe we feel lonely because we tend to favor screen time over face time. I can admit to (regularly) doing all of these things and to often feeling these ways.

The truth is, there’s a lot we can do to help ourselves. Mental health isn’t just about our brain; it’s about our body too. In fact, mind and body aren’t the separate entities as which we tend to treat them – we are a comprehensive whole, and we need to learn to treat ourselves as such. So be good to yourself! Take a break from homework, visit a friend, take a walk, eat some vegetables, take a nap, set aside some time and do a guided meditation, whatever you need to support your physical and mental well-being.

If we want to talk mental illness, let’s talk mental illness: the top five mental disorders causing disability are depression, alcohol abuse, schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder, and bipolar disorder. The categories of people most likely to be affected by mental illness are those with serious physical illness, kids and teens with disrupted childhoods, those in poverty, the unemployed, females who have suffered abuse or violence, and elderly persons left without social support. Notice that stressed college students aren’t part of that list; we aren’t a high-risk demographic.

So, for all you stressed/tired/anxious/sad/lonely students out there:

First of all, you matter and the way you feel matters. It’s okay to not feel happy and peppy and amazing all the time; sometimes, even a lot of the time, things just won’t going your way. However, feeling low doesn’t mean you are mentally ill (hooray!), and you don’t necessarily need counseling (double hooray!).

I argue that the months-long waiting list at the Counseling Center isn’t due to lack of staffing, but rather because we so quickly jump to counseling as our solution. You have alternatives. Mindful USC does great work training students to be awake, receptive, and self-compassionate. The Lyon Center and Rec Sports are amazing resources for keeping active while making friends and having fun in the process (you can find me at Zumba classes several times a week). Meditation can really help you connect with your mind, your body, and the world around you, and some really great guided meditations can be found online. Even just sitting and talking with a friend you trust can really help you work through what you’re going through. It’s when you’re doing all these things and it still isn’t enough, when you feel that your mental state is controlling and/or restricting your ability to lead a fulfilling life, that you should absolutely seek counseling. (Even so, practicing the above techniques won’t hurt!)

In conclusion, you’re not helpless, and you’re not hopeless. A lot of your mental well-being is truly under your control. That’s something we, as Trojans, need to embrace.