With the lid descending on the annual back-to-school pressure cooker, I can vividly recall my own battle with anxiety and depression during my time at university.
Three months into the first year of my science program, my brain began whispering that it didn’t matter if I went to class. That I would feel better if I just slept a little while longer.
By second year, it was telling me to not answer the door when my dorm-mates knocked. It was saying that sleeping was now more important than eating. It convinced me that my then-long-time boyfriend couldn’t and shouldn’t love me.
The campus psychologists were supportive, but they weren’t with me every hour of the day, and they weren’t with me at night.
The nights were the hardest.
By third year, my body was shutting down. Stress-related illnesses eventually led to an evening of emergency surgery, and, when I woke up, my mind and I finally agreed: I was a failure. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t finish my degree.
I withdrew, moved back in with my parents, and started working and saving to travel to places where no one would know how inadequate I felt.
I was gone for two and a half years.
Looking back on the time I spent abroad, it was the only thing that eventually gave me enough perspective on my strengths and abilities and passions to start arguing with my troubled mind. To tell myself that I knew more than my depression did. That my anxieties were wrong, and I was in control. And, most importantly, that I could come back to Canada and it wouldn’t happen again.
Travel was my escape – an expensive but thankfully not life-threatening addiction. It’s not an option or a solution for everyone, however, and according to the Canadian Association of College and University Student Services (CACUSS), more than half of Canadian students will experience exactly what I did.
In June 2013, CACUSS published the largest amount of data ever collected on the health of Canadian post-secondary students. Of the 30,000 respondents, nearly 90 per cent reported feeling overwhelmed by their responsibilities, while more than 50 per cent said that things felt hopeless.
The results also revealed that more than a third had, at some point in the past 12 months, felt so depressed that it was difficult to function, and more than half had experienced overwhelming anxiety.
On the issue of suicide, a sobering 9.5 per cent said that they had seriously considered taking their own lives in the past year.
When I reached out to Dr. Aneesa Shariff, a psychologist with UBC Counselling Services, to discuss student mental health, the first thing I wanted to know was if it’s only those “born anxious” who suffer, or if previously healthy and well-adjusted high schoolers were at risk of college implosion as well?
“Some people have always struggled with that, but there’s also a big situational and environmental component. So you can take someone who has been pretty calm and not had any of these issues throughout school, and then they come to [university], things get stressful, and there are a lot of changes,” she says. “They may be away from home for the first time. They may be a first-year student, and struggling to adjust to massive lectures – you know, 50,000 students on campus trying to navigate their way around, and not being followed as much by the instructor and just being left to themselves to get the work done on their own. All of that stress can bring on situational anxiety and depression.”
Yet the counselling staff see everyone from first-years to graduate students, international newcomers to stay-at-homers, paid-in-fullers to scholarship-winners.
“It’s very unpredictable around here. Our top presenting issues tend to be depression and anxiety, and then relationship breakups. But from one person to another it can vary from that to transitioning to university to something as severe as symptoms of psychosis and mental illness that has gone undiagnosed.”
Shariff, who has worked with UBC Counselling Services for almost four years, says treatment typically starts with addressing how each student thinks and acts, using cognitive behavioral therapy.
“We spend a lot of time looking at both the person’s thoughts and the role of the anxious thoughts and worries that are driving their emotional state and their subsequent behaviors.”
The counsellors also teach behavioral skills such as relaxation techniques and exercise.
“Cognitive behavioral therapy is an evidence-based first-line treatment for many different anxiety disorders,” she explains.
According to Shariff, people experience anxiety in two primary ways.
“Some people experience it very physically in their bodies, so they may notice a lot of physical symptoms that may be quite scary: Shortness of breath, pounding or racing heart, dizziness, feeling stomach distress like nausea or like their stomach is in knots, muscle tension,” she says. “Other people experience it in the sense of just worries. Worries that feel uncontrollable, that they can’t seem to let go of. Worrying for a large portion of their day. And it just seems to be those ‘What if?’ hypothetical kind of thoughts. They tend to be worst-case scenarios that we play out in our head.”
People who worry incessantly before bedtime, or find it hard to relax, will report insomnia, nightmares, restless sleep, and sleep that is non-restorative, which leaves them feeling drained upon waking in the morning.
“Some people will also notice changes in their appetite, like they don’t feel like they can keep a lot of food down,” she adds.
That may sound like every student, but Shariff says there is one key question students can ask themselves when debating whether to seek help: Are the symptoms altering or impairing their behavior, or causing them to miss classes and withdraw socially?
“Once the symptoms start to impact their actual behavior, and their ability to meet their responsibilities and do what they need to do, that’s when it starts to become a problem requiring professional help.”
Mental illness and Canadian youth:
• An estimated 10 to 20 per cent of Canadian youth are affected by a mental illness or disorder – the single most disabling group of disorders worldwide.
• The total number of 12 to 19-year-olds in Canada at risk for developing depression is 3.2 million.
• Suicide is among the leading causes of death for Canadians 15 to 24 years old, second only to accidents; 4,000 people die prematurely each year by suicide.
• Mental disorders in youth are ranked as the second highest hospital care expenditure in Canada, surpassed only by injuries.
• In Canada, only one out of five children who need mental health services receives them.
(Source: Canadian Mental Health Association)
Where to find help:
Crisis Line Association of BC Mental Health Information Line, 24 hours
• 310-6789 (no need to dial area code)
YouthInBC.com, 24 hours
• 604-872-3311 (Greater Vancouver)
Kelty Mental Health Resource Centre
• 1-800-665-1822
