<p>My son is a Mechanical Engineering student (freshman) at UIUC and is doing fine. My daughter, however, is a junior at a top school on the East Coast. We live on the West coast. When she was a freshman, she developed a major depression. We got her some counseling over the winter break and sent her back to school for 2nd semester. Her counseling continued sophomore year. This year (Junior year), she was planning to study abroad 2nd semester. It was brought to my attention by the counseling staff at her school that she had developed an eating disorder. We did not allow her to study abroad, needless to say. In fact, after many discussions with her over the phone and further encouragement from the campus phychologist, we finally got her to agree to take 2nd semester off and enter a program to deal with her depression. I did some research to find a program that will work for her. She came home at the end of the semester and began the program on December 28th. It is a very intensive program to help her deal with her depression and eating disorder problem. (She had neither of these problems prior to going to college.) By the way, she has been on the Dean’s list every semester so she is doing very well academically, but not so well emotionally. Your son’s depression might very well be the cause of his problem. Please get him some intensive help for it. It can be awful. You might want to have him work with a psychologist (in addition to the MD who is prescribing the meds) to give him the cognitive skills to learn to deal with his depression longterm.</p>