Looking Deeply at a Social Problem
mental health
In a Colorless World of Competition
By Sana Haddadi
The race itself made me eliminate my hobbies one by one by trying to prioritize and focus on one thing, the race itself. I stopped playing piano after 7 years. All of a sudden all those talents and skills, seemed foreign to me. I started my days, with extreme panic attacks. I precisely remember asking my dad to place his hand on my heart so he can feel my heartbeats and what I'm going through. My heartbeats were faster than the race itself. I was getting the grades I was hoping for but the void inside me was never filled with the happiness of getting good grades. Meanwhile, the race never stopped for anyone. I found myself in a colorless world of competition.
Neoliberalism and The Student Mental Health Crisis
By Elias IV Espina Roman
I am not a professor with a professional degree. I am not an avid student activist with knowledge about the political and social climate of the United States. I am only a student, but one that has suffered losses in the hands of neoliberalism. I understand the endless cycle of guilt and painful aftermath of self-reproach. I understand the extreme hunger for success and the decline of oneself from an individual to a cog in the system. I have experienced the monster first-hand, so I know in my heart that I genuinely wish for no one else to experience it.
That Feeling of Failing and Anxious Thoughts Heightened in Remote Learning
By Dina Mousavi
Right now, my source of motivation comes from counting down the days until I receive the break I so greatly need. The classes I once enjoyed and the studies that once motivated me are now the same ones I feel the most anxious about. My struggle does not feel as if it is worth it sometimes, and this thought has accentuated during this pandemic.
What Happens to People Like Me who are Deemed Abnormal?
By Anonymous
Our mentality as Americans says you can do and have it all if you work hard enough. So, what happens to people like me who are deemed "abnormal?" People who have this label or people who have not been given the same advantages in life begin to feel a sense of isolation from their community. It starts with society members rejecting them as "outcasts." This rejection is linked to our neoliberalist views and the individualistic nature of our nation because people with the label "mental illness" are seen as adding no value to the community. Neoliberalism tells us that the underperforming population is not worthy by this ideology's standards. In short, people like me who are different cannot live up to these normative expectations. Our society recognizes mental illness as a shortfall, and it decreases that person's competitive edge in the community. These attitudes from others lead the person to internalize this socially constructed deficit as a personal failure instead of a problem stemming from our nation's structure.
Murmurs and the Sound of Tears
By Anonymous
Almost three years ago, my brother attempted to take his life. It must have been May, maybe June—I honestly do not know. To this day, no one—not my brother, nor my mom—have told me the full story, the details are a flurry of fragments. Weeks after the “situation” I heard murmurs and the sound of tears escape through the space between the floor and the door of my mother’s bedroom. No one has yet to plainly state that my brother tried to kill himself. Its occurrence is an indisputable fact and yet it is treated like a secret with room to be challenged, my brother tried to take his life.
The Context That Shaped My Struggle With Anorexia
By Anonymous
There is a systemic issue that lies within society. The impact of mainstream media can be deadly. It is a very misunderstood disease and complex because it affects your body, spirit, and mind. Young girls see these 5’10” and 110-pound Victoria’s Secret models or the celebrities on the covers of magazines and think that’s how they should look. They are declared to be the most beautiful women in the world and sets unrealistic standards for women. Young girls see this as what they need to look like in order to be classified as beautiful or successful. This culture of praising the skinny, or toned women is unhealthy for society. It puts pressure on women to fulfill this unsaid criterion in order to love themselves. This stems from gender norms and the male gaze because women are placed under immense social pressure to maintain this gender order.
Life-Sustaining Equilibrium
By Nancy Lopez
It is the second week of June and I am sitting in my living room floor with my laptop staring at me waiting for me to type in something. The topic is plant diversity and the microbiome, but all I can think about is the chaos going on outside the four walls that surround me. There are students running around in a panic moving their personal belongings out of their dorms and into their parent’s vehicles. While at the same time, I can hear a symphony of car horns from right outside my window where a black lives matter march is taking place fifty feet away from me.
Convinced I was Just Being Lazy
By Anonymous
The summer before I started high school I felt a change. Slowly but surely, I felt myself losing my appetite, my interest in my hobbies, my enjoyment of life. The days began to blur together as I lied in bed for weeks on end half-awake with a Netflix show droning on in the background, shoving chips in my mouth more out of boredom than hunger. No one intervened; my parents were out of town and my brother who was meant to be babysitting me never bothered to check up on me, so this vegetative state dragged on for weeks, or maybe months. When I began school, the steep increase in workload from middle school instantly overwhelmed me and I fell into a depressive state. I did not recognize it for what it was. Growing up in a conservative Russian family, many subjects were taboo, so I had never heard of mental illness apart from cautionary tales.
Healing Mental Illness
By Jonathan Durnford
I jolted awake on a concrete floor, heart beating rapidly to keep time with the pounding in my head, which was in no way helped by the glare of white lights overhead. My knuckles felt raw, my forehead dripped with warm blood. I had no idea how I got there, what transpired between the revels of my 24th birthday and the nauseating chamber imprisoning me. Leaning against the wall, confused and hungover, I reflected on the preceding years.