Yesterday, as the snow fell and stuck for the first time of the season, the campus and town transformed into a powder-sugar haven, and it was certain – winter is really here.
Yet, the snow will be falling for months to come, and it won’t always be so magical. It will begin to suck, and prompt us hole up for warmth and listen to The Smiths for hours on end. Last week, Dr. Lisa Rone from the Northwestern Medical School spoke on the medical classification for these winter doldrums, Seasonal Affective Disorder – giving us the clever acronym SAD.
One doesn’t need to do much research to know that SAD is a significant part of the Winter Quarter experience at NU. You can feel it on campus, people bundled to anonymity, battling the frigid air.
This seasonal depression is part of a much larger recent trend of increased depression on college campuses nationwide. An article in Sunday’s New York Times dubbed the current generation of college students (that’s us) “the therapy generation.” The stresses of college, including sleep deprivation and substance abuse (that’s many of us, as well), can trigger depression. Fifteen percent of the total population suffers from depression at some point in their lives, with first instances of severe depression occurring often in the teens and early twenties. And while young women still are twice as likely to suffer from depression than their male counterparts, for our generation depression has “gone from being a housewife’s disease to a student’s.”
In response to the increase in depression among college students, many universities are improving their health facilities. Columbia University recently spent $100,000 to survey its class of 2005 in order to provide them with better mental health facilities. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which has seen a 50 percent increase in the use of its mental health facilities from 1995 to 2000 and has the highest suicide rate among colleges, also has announced plans for a major and overhaul of its mental health services. Today’s college students are overachievers who can balance their resumes and activities, but not their personal lives; twenty-something intellectuals who want to save the world, but haven’t quite learned to take care of themselves.
In 1994, Elizabeth Wurtzel attempted to theorize why this has happened to our generation in her book “Prozac Nation,” a vivid account of being “young and depressed in America” as an undergraduate at Harvard. Her inconclusive reasoning touches on everything from the rising divorce rate to Kurt Cobain’s suicide.
But, our generation has been given other titles aside from “the therapy generation.” In April’s Atlantic Monthly, social anthropologist David Brooks coined the term “the organization kid,” in his examination of intensely driven, sleep-deprived, and over-scheduled students at top colleges, “A generation of students who are extraordinarily bright, and incredibly industrious… They regard the universe as beneficent, orderly, and meaningful.” It seems the organization kid needs to pencil in that enthusiasm and industriousness can be toxic and self-destructive in the right amounts, and that our universe is certainly not as orderly and benevolent as we might once have thought.
