Colleges and suicide

emeraldkity4
Fri, 03 Dec 2004 15:47:36 +0000

A couple things I observed from my daughter and her friends.
Some kids no matter their problems will not seek help.
One of her friends was “cutting” herself and seemed very depressed. She would seek out friends to talk to about her problems but would not tell her parents or go to the clinic. I don’t think because of needing to take time off, but that might have been part of it.
My daughter was more proactive. She found a therapist at the school freshman year ( a NP) and saw her a couple times a month. Unfortunately, every year they changed and her junior year was probably not using her therapist as much as she should have been.
It is hard, cause I can imagine that colleges want to limit students who need extra resources whether they have learning disabilities, health concerns or both. These are a drain admittedly in both time and money and often at least in my daughters case, didn’t cost any extra. So I can see students not being upfront at admittance or even afterward . It is hard as an adult to admit that I have these extra things I have to accomodate. For a new adult who wants to fit in, I can see them hiding things cause if you don’t think about it, you don’t have to deal with it.
We didn’t really check out the facilities at bigger schools she was applying to, and frankly while we did check out the support for learning differences we didn’t really check out the health clinic. It seems to radically vary in effectiveness. She had very good care from her psychiatric nurse practioner but then she was misdiagnosed as having a cold when she had mono.
I feel we are still a Puritanical society in that we feel that mental health issues are the patients “fault”. A few years ago when the SSRIs first came out, it was great cause they have fewer side effects than the tricyclics. But then all these articles in newspapers and magazines about “happy” pills, that made it sound like all you have to do was pop a pill and your problems would disappear.
That is really unfair. People who are diabetic take medicine and still have to manage their illness but they aren’t looked at as taking the “easy way out”. If you have something physical wrong, most people will go to a dr. but with mental issues even though they are just as real, we ( I ) feel like we just aren’t trying hard enough.

Culturally some students may even be less likely to seek help than American born students and that is something that needs to be addressed as well