When I thought of going to college when I was younger, I had never imagined that I would be experiencing depression. I had always had this exciting image of college conjured up in my mind that included being super social, and active, and generally pretty happy. But that hasn’t necessarily been the case.
My depression makes sense. I come from a poorer family, my parents are immigrants and I experienced quite a bit of emotional abuse growing up. I struggled a lot with my education and did not have strong support at home or at school. I first started experiencing depression in high school. I would have good days, but frequently there were days when I felt down.
In college, my depression really started coming out in my freshman year. There were financial troubles going on in my home, so I struggled to support myself, and I while I wasn’t necessarily struggling academically, I had a lot of issues in figuring out what I wanted to do.
I was also living away from home for the first time and was struggling to relate to people. Those factors contributed to my depression, and further experiencing those things as a depressed person only made me more depressed, furthering the cycle. I eventually reached out to the counseling center at my university and for the first time in my life was actually diagnosed with depression.
I continue to struggle with depression to this day. I don’t feel like I’ve had a lot of control in my college experience. Particularly, I’ve struggled the most in my social life. Finding people I relate to and making friends is still hard for me (although I do have a few wonderful friends who I’m super thankful for). I also go to school in Western Washington state which tends to experience a lot of gray and dreary weather, especially in the winter months, making it a little more difficult for me to get enough vitamin D and making me more receptacle to depression.
However, I do make the effort to get help. I have continued with counseling and have started antidepressants. I also take vitamin D supplements and have learned to keep myself busy with school, work, but also activities that I love, like swimming, writing, listening to music, etc.
The hardest thing about being a college student with depression is that depression isn’t normalized in our society in general, let alone in students. This makes it really difficult to speak openly about depression. Catching up with old friends who do not have depression and are going to other universities has been hard; there is this incomprehension of how I could not be having a good time, and the same goes for some of my relatives during the holidays. When I admit that I have depression, it usually ends up being a bit awkward, and I end up feeling kind of ashamed.
I even made a Facebook post about my depression as a student and how lonely I felt to a Facebook group specifically made for people experiencing mental illnesses, and the first person to comment said that I should be “patient,” “that college is the time when we meet our family” and that I should “go to the library and meet people.”
While the commenter may have had good intentions, they probably thought I was a freshman as opposed to a senior who had tried those tactics. Their comment perfectly exemplifies how depression isn’t seen as “normal” for college students; they think initial feelings of depression will go away because college experiences are supposed to be good, and I just need to put myself out there.
In general, there’s this idea of college being the best time of your life, a time when you find yourself, meet your college family, decide on a future career, etc. Having depression goes against that expectation. If you have depression as a student, you are doing college wrong. This, of course, is absurd, as plenty of people have depression in college.
Having depression is hard, and it sucks, but it is human, and it is normal, and people shouldn’t have to feel ashamed of being depressed just because they are young and in college.
