By Katherine Gibson (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: October 9, 2013
Whether you’re in your first semester or finishing up your last, students are no strangers to the pressures that come along with university life. Papers, midterms, and hours of reading piled on top of part-time jobs and family responsibilities can overwhelm even the most organized person.
Looking to address these student anxieties, the UFV counselling departmen set up booths on October 3 for students to come and take free, anonymous, and confidential screening tests. The event was in conjunction with the 19th annual Depression Anxiety Education Screening Day in BC.
“Today wasn’t about counselling,” explains Eileen Burkholder, a student services counsellor. “Today was about education and starting conversations.”
These conversations, looking to educate and help students suffering with anxiety, depression, or high-risk drinking activities, saw an increased amount of students coming to discuss the anxiety they were feeling. Burkholder attributes these anxieties in part to the hectic lifestyles that many students now have to live.
“I think that, overall, there’s more stress on students [now] than there was 10 or even 20 years ago,” she notes. “Students are not so traditional anymore. Often students will work 25-35 hours a week and take four courses … I don’t think 25 years ago it was like that so much; you had the more traditional students who left university from high school, lived in a dormitory and that’s all they did – that was their job.”
Beyond this, Burkholder also reflects on the role that an increased dependence on technology has had in increasing student anxieties.
“[Student] connection to the internet and instant messaging [causes] a lot of stress because it’s ‘right now,’” she says. “Information is always ‘right now’; you’re always responding ‘right now.’”
While Burkholder acknowledges that for many students, cutting out all increased pressures from their lives is unrealistic, she advises that there are key steps to living alongside anxiety. She suggests identifying, through counselling, how patterns of thought, or self-defeating belief systems work in the mind. Burkholder also emphasizes that simply breathing properly can make a significant difference.
“[Deep breathing] is the quickest way to reverse our body’s tension,” she continues, “Even one breath will start to reverse it. We have a natural relaxation reflex, and the quickest way I know to kick in your reflex of relaxation is breath.”
Burkholder is hopeful that the event and the knowledge it provides will have lasting effects on the student body and awareness of mental health.
“Physically if you’re ill, you’re not going to be able to study very well. With mental health, if that is interfering, you’re not going to be able to perform very well either,” she says. “There’s so much emphasis in university on our academic development, and then there’s the physical development. Well, mental health is equal—one is not better than the other—we are one complete system as human beings.”
