Cogito ergo doleo.
I think therefore I am depressed.
It's time to talk about a fashion trend that's been sweeping the media for the past few years: depression among college students. If you somehow missed articles in such publications as USA Today, Time, US News, Psychiatric News, or your very own daily campus news, depression is on the rise with college students. Prozac is quickly becoming the ring pop of the college years.
Or at least this is what the "experts" would have us believe. Today I'm not really that interested in dissecting college student depression; I want to look at this media obsession. These media articles love to quote statistics. Not any statistics will do; they want to quote flawed statistics without every acknowledging their own limitations. Reports of depression are hard to pin down, but most of these writers toss them out like Holy Writ, and it leaves me wondering if they're simply stupid or pulling a highly ironical prank on all of us. Since these articles have the same amount of humor in their tone as a hysterical feminist who feels she has been oppressed, I'm going to lean towards the former.
There is one statistic each article whips out in the beginning: according to surveys such as those conducted by the American College Health Association, 10% of college students are diagnosed with major depression and 25% feel at some time "so depressed it was difficult to function." Wow. Um, that's so incredibly . . . like the general population. Maybe the headline should be: Breaking News, College Students Are Just As Depressed as You. In the United States about 9.5% of the population is officially suffering from major depression during a single year, approximately 30% of all women become depressed at some point, and while numbers are harder to pin down for men, new research suggests it is comparable to women. If you look at it that way, college students overall are less depressed than the rest of the population. It must be the Red Bull.
The staff of college health service groups are only too eager to comment on the amount of depressed students. Hey, the more of us who are feeling blue the more job security they get. One college staff member was quoted by Social Work Today as saying, "67% of all students who seek counseling show signs of being depressed," (emphasis mine). This is grave indeed. People getting counseling are not happy. They aren’t depressed necessarily, but they do show signs of it. Honestly, who do they expect in counseling? Psychopaths? Last time I looked, our counseling services didn't even have a check-box for us on the intake forms that said, "I sometimes like to kill people." Sure, people go to counseling for other issues and disorders, but even people with other mental health disorders frequently have comorbidity with depression.
One of my favorite "numbers" came from a staffer at a college in Georgia. She said that she rates depression as the third biggest problem for students after "academics and anxiety." You mean depression is more of a problem than kleptomania? You mean more students are depressed than dying from scurvy? We have more depressed people than anorexics, alcoholics, drug addicts and rapists? And this is a bad thing? The article used her quote to create a doomsday like effect, but let me ask this — what do they want to be the third biggest problem for students? And let's not forget, according to their earlier statistics, 75% of all students never get passed the trials of academics or anxiety to feel depressed.
Furthermore, how exactly is she separating schoolwork and anxiety and depression? Schoolwork can cause stress which leads to depression. Anxiety can cause a loss of functioning that can lead to depression. Depression can cause a loss of functioning that can lead to panic attacks. And around and around we go. I think many students would say those three issues are inextricably linked. So I'm left asking, what was this quote supposed to accomplish or prove?
Here is my problem with these numbers: they are serving to appease the public guilt about college suicides and campus shootings rather than addressing the real problem. They write these articles because there is a public fear and horror about certain events happening at colleges in this country, even here at our very own Ivy League institutions. Instead of giving the public useful, insightful numbers, they give them shallow hype.
Want to talk numbers? Fine. Let's talk about the statistic that 10% of students are diagnosed with depression. Most colleges have paperwork categorizing at least 10% of their student population as alcoholics. So either we have non-depressed alcoholics or the alcoholics are the only depressed people on campus. Obviously there may be some problems with our data gathering on depression among students. Do the vast number of media articles ever mention this, even once?
No.
So before we start freaking out about college students being depressed let's figure out how widespread this problem really is. There is no way we can address the problem if we don't have a realistic understanding of it. And while I usually support recycling, the media's dependency upon the same faulty statistics isn't saving any polar bears.
~Woman, Bring Me A Beer!
Get Back in the Kitchen! says: If polar bears used Prozac, they wouldn't need environmentalists to save them.
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