Depression and Stress in College

Matt Martz

College students all have to deal with stress in their daily lives. Unfortunately, sometimes the stress builds past a healthy limit and turns into something much worse, depression. Despite what many people think, depression affects a significant number of college students. From home sickness to having too much homework during the school week, stress and depression are serious problems for freshman and even upperclassmen in college.

Depression often doesn’t show for days or even weeks in college students lives. It all starts as a failed test or a break up during a relationship. Eventually all the stress becomes overwhelming and being young adults, most students don’t know what to do about all the stress. Colleges should provide more noticeable and affective help for stress and depression. According to the mtv-U polls around 85% of college students feel stress in their daily lives. All the stress is certainly not good for the student body, as stress leads to antisocial students and in the worst case, suicidal tendencies. Here at Georgia Tech there doesn’t seem to be a big problem with depression but I haven’t seen many organizations that aim to help those in need.

Stress causes mental problems but physical problems can arise too. Stressful college students release excess hormones which cause harmful imbalances in the body. The immune system can weaken causing diseases to be more prevalent, and at a place so dense with people disease is certain to spread around. Keeping stress to a minimum and keeping depression from controlling student’s lives is an important task for colleges to work towards. A stress/depression-free college would be a much brighter and stronger place.