Dang, I just read some of yalls post...
Depression?!? How do you folks even get that way?
I never understood people and their "emotional problems"...
I think everyone is capable of being in control of their mental state.
Pressure, loneliness stress, lack of sleep, illness, death or loss, major events, social anxiety, anxiety, regret, guilt, bully, and dozens of other things starts to weigh you down. The reasons are endless. It all starts to come together and sink in. We're not alone. Alot of college students goes through this.
Before you understand the situation, you have to understand what depression is and what can cause it. And you must understand that it can happen to anybody. You just don't know till it happens. Your friend may seem perfectly healthy and you may think they are ok. But deep inside they are in a world of pain and torment. Sometimes you can clearly see telltale signs. But sometimes you can't.
You want to know what some people say when you try to talk to them? "Just drink a beer" "Don't overdo it" "You're just thinking too much" "Relax, it'll all be gone in a few days" "Lets just go out, have some fun and you'll get over it" "Man up" "stop being a pansy"
I'm sure you've some stuff like these before. One of the most useful ways to get over depression,anxiety and so on is to talk about it. It helps talk about it to clear the air. Talking helps.
But when you don't have any friends, you're thousands of miles from home, you don't know who to turn to. Yea it gets really hard.
I didn't find out till my graduating year (5th year) that we had a therapist on campus that we could see. If it took me 5 years to find that out, wonder how many years it'll take for others to find out. And it's not like I'm blind to what's on campus. I see alot, I know alot about the campus since so many of my friends are the tour guides, but they've never been told about it either.
Just to pinpoint situations to help you understand why some go through it:
I had a classmate, lets call her Mai. She is a very bright student. Very cheerful, friendly for the most part. She's the youngest in her family. The first to make it this far. Her 2 older brothers, started 1 semester of city college and dropped out and are now working in warehouse jobs. Her sister started city college, but didn't make it passed the first semester before she got hooked on drugs and whatnot and her life went down the dumps. She's recovering now.
Growing up. She was pressed to be the best. She was held to a higher standard. She was "the last chance" at a college degree for her family. She was an A student in high school, taking honors and whatnot. She got to college. Went directly to a state college. Her passion was in Nursing. But nursing is so impacted, that she ended up as a double major while she was waiting. It just took longer and longer to get into the nursing program. It started to cause her to doubt herself. She didn't have much friends because she was busy studying 24/7, her family lives about 7 hours away. No friends nearby, no families nearby, she didn't want to call home and tell them her grades were slipping. She didn't want to dissapoint them again. She wanted to be the one. But the doubt, the wait, it all started to weigh down and she got really depressed. I didn't meet her till after her depression ended, which began to end when her family came to visit her as a surprise. They visited her, took her out to eat. She didn't tell them anything that was going on. But the thing that stood out was when they were leaving they told her "Whatever happens, what you do, we will always be proud of you for giving it your all, We just want you to be happy." And that helped her up.
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One of my closest friend at school told me the story about her friend, lets call her Sue, who had passed away. Sue and her sister were foster children from the age of 9 and 11. Father was an abusive alcoholic. Mother was hooked on drugs. Parents divorced when she was 5, drunk dad tried to molest her and her older sister. Mother found out and divorced and about a year later thats when her mother got hooked on drugs. It began with a few puffs of weed a day, eventually she wanted to keep feeling the "high" cause it took the stress of single parenting off of her, so she was introduced to harder stuff and she got hooked. Sue and her sister went for days scrounging up whatever food they had left. Didn't have much clothes, barely got any sleep. There was always noise in the house. Her mom's boyfriend attempted to rape them several times. Mom was too drugged up to say anything. Eventually a teacher called CPS cause she was worried and after a long case, it was chosen that it's best to take Sue away. Her dad was considered for her to be living with again, but he was nowhere to be found. They couldn't contact him. So Sue and her sister went from one fosterhome to the next. She did well in school and got excepted into college via scholarships. Her sister just simply "aged out" of the foster system. Her sister met some "friends." while Sue tried to go to college but it all started to crash from there. She had trouble getting a place of her own to stay, she didn't have someone to co-sign the lease with her. She didn't have friends. Then when winter, spring, and summer break came along, most people would visit families. Where would she go? Visit her foster parents? Or visit her sister? She visited her sister, and her sister was often doing drugs. She got hooked on it too. Then she had ptsd while she was at school. It wasn't ever clear if it was drugs or everything that happened causing it. She ended up committing suicide.
And that's just 2 of the many stories I've heard and been told by classmates.
It happens to anyone. You can see the vulnerability and who it can affect when you go to a suicide prevention walk. Firefighters, teachers, students, etc. Doesn't matter who, doesn't matter what profession, depression, anxiety, suicide, can happen to anyone and everyone.
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Things happen and you just can't control or just aren't ready for it. It's not a matter of being in control of your mental state, it's a matter of knowing what to do when you crash. And that's something alot of us don't learn till after it happens. Or in some cases, you just never know because you haven't experienced it.
You can prep and prep and prep. But even the most prepared person can still crash when depression hits because it's unexpected. It doesn't always just pop up one morning, most of the time, it's like a slow burn, slowly building and burning overtime till eventually it hits the cap and then down you go.
One of the reasons why your experience is different is because you have friends with you. Your situation of not being able to go out is different from one who is lonely since you weren't alone. You had people there with you, possibly even to support, people to surround yourself with. So you never had the feeling of depression and whatnot. And I'm not saying this as a knock on you. College is tough, and we all tend to believe we got it, especially at the beginning. But as the years goes by, with each and every tick of the clock, it gets tougher and tougher.
It's the reason some consider college "the place where dreams goes to die." You can go in all positive and have dreams of being an artist, of being a teacher, but college changes your dreams. I know many people I met freshman year that said "i want to be a biologist" "I want to be a teacher" "I want to get my PHD in ..." "I want to be a cop" "I want to be a CJ student" and then I meet them 2 or so years later and they'll say "I'm a business major, it's the safe major to go." Painful to hear, someone with such high enthusiasm and belief in their self start off big and then go "the safe route."
Everyone is different. Everyone goes through life differently. You can't possibly understand someone else unless you were directly walking in their shoes as them. People will always say the rhetoric and often offensive thing of "I understand" I know how you feel" "I was in a similar situation" and "I know the feeling, I felt that way when ...." The truth is. YOU DON'T know the feeling. And that's not to say, you don't know because you've never been in the situation. You don't know because you are not them. No amount of telling someone about experiences is going to get them to feel what the person felt when they going through it.
We're all different people. We all go through life differently.
