Mental illness is not a personal failure. Directly or indirectly, an entire society is responsible for helping a person maintain their mental health.
The question here is what can colleges do to take care of their students’ mental health, especially if a college itself is responsible for a student’s deteriorating condition?
Let us take a look at the Gandhian Educational System. By education, I mean an all-round development in mind, body, and spirit. Literacy is not the end of education or even the beginning. On the basis of this ideology, is the system followed by the present-day colleges, a success? In most of the cases, they only aim at the academic development of a student. And it creates an immense pressure on students to perform a certain way.
According to the mental health research conducted by the National Alliance or Mental Illness (NAMI):-
- One in four students has a diagnosable illness.
- 40% do not seek help.
- 80% feel overwhelmed by their responsibilities.
- 50% have become so anxious that they struggle in college.
Isn’t it ironic that we expect to have the time of our lives in college, but we end up suffering instead?
I am a 20-year-old girl, and I am currently doing my Bachelor’s in technology. As an engineering student, I have faced some situations where I felt like this was the end of my career. I craved so much for academic excellence that I couldn’t embrace my failures.
At the start of college, I had a lot of dreams. But soon enough, classes turn into battlefields where we were waging wars just to score the most marks. As time went by, our dreams started to fade away. I feel what remains right now is just anxiety, depression and regrets about the mistakes I made.
Life became all about weekly, monthly and annual exams and vivas. Every day seemed like a nightmare, and our life seemed to be crumbling around us.
But I believe colleges can help their students in overcoming all these issues. They can have mentoring sessions where students feel relaxed to share their problems and opinions with someone they really trust. Students should be able to really enjoy what is being taught, and their syllabus should not become a burden for them.
American actress Larisa Oleynik had once said, “College Inspired me to think differently. It’s like no other time in your life.”
Yes, college should be a place which inspires students to think out of the box. College should not be just about exams and projects. We should be able to enjoy our days and graduate as evolved and better human beings.