While graduating High School is enough stress on its own, those who attend College can feel even worse trying to make it to their next finish line. Most of the time, students find it hard to balance out their school life with their work life and do not always have the opportunities to solely focus on school. Sometimes it is just the sheer amount of classwork to be completed that drains a student. Other times, students can get too overwhelmed being in classes, having jobs, and working with organizations all at the same time. And although the importance of Mental Health has increased over the years, there are still a significant amount of areas that need attention and have yet to be improved upon when considering helping the Mental Health of College students.
Typically, the role of helping students with Mental Health is placed upon Student Health Centers nearby or within the college itself. Of course, these are people who have made it in the career of nursing and psychology. They know what the symptoms look like and how to diagnose it. They can even help you work through it with counseling sessions. It makes sense, right? Though, these services are not always known to the students of a college.
So then, the different organizations on campus tend to take part in the role too. Many organizations will host events centered around the topic of Mental Health. They can provide on-campus information or local information to the students so that they have an outlet if they feel like they need it. Great, problem solved, right? Students are now seeing events on-campus about Mental Health and the services around them they can utilize. But this still is not the root of the problem, so what is?
In reality, the effects of poor Mental Health can come from many sources, especially many sources all at once. However, if you only focus on the nonpersonal source that is shared by all college students, then you narrow it down to college itself. Now, I realize that there are still many sources within college that can lead to poor Mental Health, but I feel like there is one hugely overlooked, or underestimated, source. This source is from the College Professors themselves.
College Professors are the people that run the course and make all the decisions when it comes to the amount of work for that particular class. So, when someone is stressed over the classwork for their courses, it ultimately is based on the Professor who assigned the work. Now, I am not trying to say that all Professors want to watch you fail, but I do not think that many take into account the realities of how unhealthy college can be for a student’s mental health, which is a little ironic since they were once a student as well.
Think of it like this: You have five courses this semester which means you have five professors assigning you work for each class. If each Professor gave you daily as well as weekly work that you needed to complete outside of class, the amount of work you had altogether would add up significantly fast even if it may not be that overwhelming for one class. This is a main topic from students when communicating about their professors, “It’s like they don’t realize I have other classes with the same amount of work. They all expect me to complete their work on time, but how can I when I have all this to do?”
It is not uncommon for students to get overwhelmed very quickly when this is a typical setting for college courses, or college professors. Then, if a student has work on top of it? Or organizations? Or family issues? There is no wonder why many students have poor Mental Health in college. But this is just how college is, right? “College is not meant for everyone, and if you cannot handle it, then you should not be in college.” Or is this just the stereotype, the idealistic perspective of college that is actually incredibly unhealthy for students?
To be continued…
hcxo