Mental Health in Young Adults: Interview With a BU Student
November 16, 2021
By Amanda Bang
TW: Depression/Suicide
Mental health has become a more prominent topic ever since the pandemic, especially for young adults. There has been an increase of people, especially college students suffering from deteriorating mental health or just an abundance of stress from the start and because of the pandemic. In a survey conducted by the CDC, 63% of 18- to-24-year-olds reported symptoms of anxiety or depression. However, mental health is still seen as a stigmatized topic.
Emily Evangelakos, a journalism student at Boston University, spoke about her experience with mental health, especially in a university setting.
Evangelakos said that mental health problems were more considered as a “sickness” that can be fixed until recently. She shared that the stigmatization of mental health has been always there and that the media plays a part in circulating the stigmatization around mental illnesses. One example she gave was the movie “Split” which came out in 2016.
“It’s just a terrible representation,” Evangelakos said. “I think that it, you know, kind of keeps the stigmatization going and it doesn’t help.”
However, Evangelakos said social media has been a place where teenagers and the younger generation start conversations around mental health recently. She has been active on her own social media in opening up about mental health and helping out others.
“I think social media has definitely helped and even in my own experiences,” she said. “I’ve had people contact me and come to me when they want to talk to someone, and I think that really helps break the stigma and also help people you know find people that can talk to.”
Evangelakos said “talking about it” is the one of the most effective ways to break the stigma.
“By making it known that people aren’t alone like that’s where the stigma is broken,” she said. “I think conversations are the easiest way to break it because I think silence is what creates the stigma.”
The CDC survey mentioned above also conveyed that 25.5% of the respondents aged 18–24 years said they have seriously considered suicide in the past 30 days at the time of completing the survey. Upon hearing these statistics, Evangelakos said it was “shocking” and “sad” how high the numbers were.
“I’ve definitely seen it with students around me,” she said. “More and more people are experiencing it and more and more people have especially felt it with the pandemic.”
Evangelakos mentioned she had personally interacted with a lot of students who were using medication for mental health, conveying how common these problems have become. In light of this, although she knows some resources exist in Boston University in assisting students such as counselling, she says the university is not doing enough.
“It’s interesting because BU is world renowned for their Center for Anxiety and they have all these incredible programs, but they are for students that aren’t at BU,” said Evangelakos. “So I feel like they should be offering, with all the money that BU has especially, I feel like they should be offering these programs for students.”
For her, external resources such as joining a dialectical behavior therapy group was “more helpful than anything.”
“You actually hear people’s experiences that are really similar to yours and it kind of makes you feel like I’m not crazy,” Evangelakos said. “Other people experience things too.”
She said accepting mental health issues as part of who she was and that having it wasn’t a bad thing helped her overcome some struggles she had earlier in her life.
“Mental health, to me, is like embracing the individuality of yourself, like the complexities of your brain and your mind because every person is like a snowflake as cheesy as that sounds.”