Casey Marley – Managing Editor
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April 13 called for rain. It’s April, and it’s “showers” are commonplace. However, at UAB April is not the first month of true spring, it’s a month filled with dread, hard work, and fear of failing: the last month of Spring classes, and final exam time.
Sophomore USGA Senator Mugdha Mokashi knows first hand that finals bring intense uneasiness and stressful tension, and as a member of UAB’s Mental Health Advisory Board, she found the funds and organizations to create a “Mental Health Positivity Picnic” midweek in April, before dead week, when stress begins to creep into UAB student lives more and more.
“I wanted to have this program to have fun, we have money we can have food, but I really want some intentional work to be done. I’m actually partnered with this Mental Health Advisory Board, partnered with Student Health and Wellness, so we talk about ‘what are some needs on campus, what are we talking about, what are we not talking about,’ and Active Minds was there and a few other campus organizations were there, I think through that meeting I realized that we could do this, this would be fun. And the time I wanted to do this was close enough to finals where I thought this would be a really important focus,” Mokashi said.
Mokashi’s passion for mental health awareness is not brought on by simply altruism, the dual undergraduate Neuroscience and master’s Public Health student knows first hand the crippling effects that suffering from a mental health disorder can have on a person’s daily life.
“I began to recognize that the anxiety that I was feeling wasn’t a normal feeling, and the thing that really hit for me was that anxiety can be debilitating, and I didn’t know that. I didn’t realize that things that were happening in your head could really put you physically unable to work. It was getting to the point, you know my grades were perfect, but there were some days where I was like, ‘I can’t go, I can’t get out of bed,’’” she said. “You can’t fix problems you don’t know about.”
However, the thought that a psychiatric condition like anxiety can can cause physical limitations on a person is not a completely agreed upon topic, or one that is commonly discussed.
“I’ve heard the standard ‘get over it,life is tough and it won’t get any easier’ or ‘deal with it,” said Stephanie Diei, a biomedical sciences major. “My mom just sent me to the psychiatrist when I always got anxious or depressed and never really sat down and talked to me. She just didn’t want to hear it even when I tried to talk to her.”
Diei told Kaleidoscope that as an African-American, she feels that mental health issues are something people “never talk” about.
“We’re not as open about it, being depressed or anxious we’re like supposed to keep it within and ‘deal with it’,” Diei said. “I feel like in the white community they are more open about it and go get counseling so the stigma isn’t really as bad as it is in the black community,” she said.
Mokashi agrees with Diei that mental illness, especially anxiety, is not just a “this person’s issue.”
“I think communities that have mental health concerns are Asian communities and Black communities,” Mokashi said. “Other communities don’t often give their own members space to talk about things like that. That’s something that we all work on, it’s cultural, it’s political, it’s social.”
Anxiety is not a rare issue at UAB according to Angela Stowe, director of Counseling Services. Anxiety is the most common diagnosis at the Health and Wellness Center.
“Both in Health Services and Counseling Services. Depression isn’t the top, but Anxiety is the top,” Stowe said. “That is not unique to UAB, that is a national trend. It’s high stakes, high stress and students bring a lot with them to college.”
In fact, according to the 2015 American College Health Association’s National College Health Assessment, 21.9 percent of all college students have said that anxiety has impacted their course work, and 30 percent of students say that stress has impacted their course work as well. 56.9 percent of all college students surveyed have felt “overwhelming anxiety.” Comparatively, roommate difficulties academically affect students 5.8 percent and internet use shows an 11.4 percent impact.
“Health services for many many years have been focused on the acute care services that students experience, taking care of their medical needs, not their Mental Health needs,” said the A.CH.A President and UAB Vice President of Student Health and Wellness, Jacob Baggot. “…but I also have noticed that students are more open about seeing a counselor, or that they are struggling with depression or anxiety, it’s becoming more normalized and more understood as part of the experiences that many of us go through.”
“For students, it’s heightened no doubt by many factors, not the least bit is the academic rigor that comes with going through a college career, and of course there a lot of factors that contribute to that as well.”
While Baggot states that higher education institutions are still learning how to address the nationwide anxiety issue, as UAB’s VP of Student Health and Wellness he says that UAB is “adopting what are considered ‘emerging best practices’” when it comes to mental health treatment.
According to Baggot, in Fall 2016, the UAB Student Health and Wellness Center will begin screening all patients for anxiety and depression, even for non-related visits as part of their updated screening protocol.
“Part of our role and responsibility is to take advantage of when a patient shows up is to not only address what they are presenting for but to understand what other things are going on in their life, and screening for depression and anxiety are absolutely things that we will be doing more of,” Baggott said. “We frequently do [screen for anxiety and depression]anyway as a matter of practice. We’re going to be putting in as part of our screening protocol and record system
prompts to ask those sort of questions.”
Mokashi thinks that students have a responsibility to themselves to speak up about their suffering.
“It’s so important for people to name their concerns. Counseling doesn’t have to be for everyone and that’s ok, but it’s really important to realize that it’s fine for you to need things and to reach out to them. It’s important for us, and I say this for me as a student leader, for administration, for professors, for people who are in charge of structures to offer support,” Mokashi said. “We have to start considering things like depression to be viable as a sick note…we have to start naming the fact that it’s as important to honor a counseling or therapy appointment like you would honor a doctor’s appointment.”
