A Word on Mental Health

Author's Note: More than a few members of my campus family have struggled or are currently struggling with mental health issues - clinical depression, for example. The following is one of my attempts to understand the silence around mental health on college campuses - why these things keep happening to good people and the apparent lack of administrative intervention.

This is nothing any group of 20-year-olds is equipped to deal with.

I've watched this happen a couple of times now. Health Services bungles the diagnosis or the treatment, most members of the house community or academic advising system remain more concerned with helping you deal with your workload than treating the root of the problem, and it falls to the depressed student's significant other and/or peers to try to help them - especially for students who are not close enough to home to spend some time sleeping in their own bed or to get their parents to advocate for them. And what's more, depression is somewhat "contagious." I should know - I've watched the shock-waves ripple outwards more than once.

And I just keep asking myself - where are the adults?

You know, the one's who are to some extent charged with your well-being - even after you've come of age?

It makes me mad, because I've seen the cycle enough times to know that there's an institutional silence around it - and that silence is hurting people.