The College Experience And Embrace Of Mental Health

Us college students feel it all the time. The sense of urgency, anxiety and even lack of sleep, are all results of one common precursor: stress. Stress was originally a mechanism developed by animal ancestors (including humans) to respond to emergent situations in order to ensure survival. This way, the sense of threat would be materialized into different psychological and physiological reactions. This mechanism is referred to as “the flight or fight” response. The fight or flight response is an automatic response that involves two pathways which activate the nervous and endocrine system. In summary, a bombing of neural transmitters will activate a cascade of hormones causing various effects on the body. The college student population presents a repeated activation of these pathways causing many consequences in their day to day health.

After the initial stimuli of stress, the sympathetic branch is the first division of the human brain activated. This division helps the body focus on what is urgent at said moment. Almost instantaneously, the human brain stops secondary functions and concentrates on releasing noradrenaline and adrenaline. As a result, the body will experience increased heart rate, constriction of the blood vessels in organs performing secondary functions and dilatation of the blood vessels associated with skeletal muscle. This occurs to increase the blood flow to the organs that will be performing the action to ensure survival. The initial response is short of duration.

However, the secondary response to stress has a longer duration and it is the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis also referred to as the HPA axis. In this pathway, a cascade of hormones is released to the body in order to obtain a final product: cortisol. A vast number of cells in the human body have cortisol receptors, for this reason this hormone can cause many changes within blood sugar, metabolism, water balance and even blood pressure.

The problem, nowadays, is the hyperactivation of these stress responses, even in non-emergent situations. Humans have adapted a way to teach their bodies to respond to non-mortal stress the same way they treat a life or death situation. Amongst the population with high rates of stress are college students. ABC news published an article titled: “3 out of 4 college students say they’re stressed, many report suicidal thoughts: Study”. This article discusses a study conducted by Cindy Liu, PhD which consists of a survey of stress in college students. College can be a very stressful stage. The change from schooling to college may be very brutal. An 18-year-old kid has to choose what to do for the rest of their lives. Upon the entrance of college, a young adult faces the consequences of adulthood: educational bills, expenses for living, and some even need to start working. As if it were not enough, the pressure of all classes such as deadlines, presentations and homework can lead a person to a mental collapse. Liu’s study found that 1/5 students have thought of suicide and 1/10 made an actual attempt. Dr. Italo Brown (2018) claims that this rate is more than double than the national average for adults.

Stress is a mechanism designed to help humans adapt to survival situations. It has a physiological and psychological effects on the body. Via the activation of hormones, it pretends to assist an organism in life threatening moments. However, the body does not recognize when stress is being activated for life threatening reasons vs non-life-threatening reasons. Every day, humans expose their bodies to stressful situations and activate said pathways for non-emergent situations. College students are a great example of people in non-emergent yet stressful situations. Prolonged exposition to stress may lead to undesirable effects in the human body. In a survey conducted by Dr. Liu, college students reported thoughts and even attempts to suicide. For this reason, society must take a look upon the college experience and embrace mental health in this particular stage of life.