Reconceptualizing Mental Health

“Have you been feeling depressed or down for most of the day nearly every day? Are you experiencing a loss of pleasure in activities you usually enjoy?” After a full summer of conducting phone interviews in a neuroscience lab that studies depression, these questions are burned into my memory.

And so are the answers to these questions that I received. This experience led to my firmly held belief that many people are experiencing extreme emotional pain and so much of this pain is being hidden.

There is a misconception about mental health on this campus. There have been pervasive conversations about stress — particularly with respect to academic performance — and wellness of the student body. However, much of this conversation misses the mark.

Mental health is about the subjective experience of the individual. There are a myriad of mental health problems — anxiety disorders, major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, to name a few — with a myriad of potential causes including loss, trauma, possibly genetics and stress.

Notice that stress is just one of the potential causes. Academic stress has come to dominate our community’s conversation about mental health, and it is only a piece of the puzzle.

Generalizations and comparisons disregard this very important aspect of the concept of mental health. Therefore, we need to shift the conversation not to what is causing the general stress of the campus but rather what is causing the stress of the individual. Each person has a unique background and personality disposition. Although it is important to discuss the culture in which we students exist on this campus, there is not enough discussion about the fact that mental health is individualized. The assumption of homogeneity is an inaccurate assumption.

The other problem that I have commonly seen in my conversations with peers on this campus is the problem of comparisons, a problem that is exactly counter to the concept of mental health. It could be that one individual with a significant trauma history develops no PTSD, but an individual with a genetic predisposition and no precipitating event develops significant major depressive disorder. Many people feel guilty about seeking help when they feel they have not had a significant event to cause their mental health problems. We should not be making generalizations or comparisons. Rather, we should be focusing on giving individuals the tools to tackle their highly individualized mental health problems.

Part of this will entail reducing stigma on campus. Whenever I sit in the waiting room in Parton in the counseling office, I always notice the immediate air of embarrassment when another student walks in. People are uncomfortable and ashamed to openly acknowledge their struggles with mental health.

This is partly why I believe academic stress has become a central part of the conversation on campus. Academic stress is something that almost everyone experiences and that it is socially acceptable to discuss. However, people are exceedingly uncomfortable when it comes to talking about social anxieties or family problems or other forms of stress. Therefore, academic stress is receiving a disproportionate amount of attention.  I also think that this emphasis on the academic stress of students is creating a divide between students and faculty members within the community. In reality, faculty members experience their own stressors and mental health problems that should be included in the dialogue.

We need to take a step back and look at how we are approaching mental health on this campus. Rather than jumping at the chance to make generalizations about academic stress causing mental health problems, we need to have more conversations about the experience of individuals. The Grid is a step in the right direction with a more holistic approach to student wellness, but there is still more work to be done. The Grid is a solutions-based approach to a problem with root causes that have yet to be fully determined. Groups such as the Student Wellness group and Resilience should be broadcasted, and students should be encouraged to engage in an open dialogue. This is a key part of the problem – there is so much going unsaid about things people go through on this campus, things that reach far beyond just academic stress.  People are embarrassed and scared to share their experience, and this is the aspect of our culture that we need to address. We need to put more emphasis on the concept that mental health is about the experience of the individual.