Mental Health Challenges For University Students 

Phase 2: Research 

what is mental health.

Our emotional, psychological, and social well-being are all parts of our mental health. It influences our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Additionally, it influences how we respond to stress, interact with others, and make good decisions. Every period of life, from childhood and adolescence to maturity, is vital for mental health.

Common Mental health challenges for University Students. 

Anxiety:  a feeling of unease, such as worry or fear, that can be mild or severe.
The majority of college students occasionally experience anxiety. However, persistent or escalating emotions of anxiety, tension, and panic can obstruct day-to-day activities. Anxiety becomes a medical issue that requires treatment when it interferes with your daily life.

Below are some of the most common types of anxiety disorders:

• Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD): This condition involves constant, severe anxiety that interferes with day-to-day activities.
• Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD): People with OCD experience intrusive and unreasonable thoughts, fears, and obsessions that lead to repetitive behaviors and compulsions.
• Panic Disorder: This condition is characterized by constant fearfulness and frequent, sudden attacks of terror and panic.
• Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): PTSD usually develops after someone experiences or witnesses a traumatic event. However, individuals can also have trauma without suffering a major catastrophic event.
• Social Anxiety Disorder: This mental health condition manifests as irrational anxiety, fear, self-consciousness, and embarrassment in everyday social interactions.

 Suicide Ideation: is characterized as a pattern of considering or organizing one’s own suicide. Experts in mental health typically classify intense or overpowering suicide
Many students struggle with stress, annoyance, and doubt, but occasionally those emotions take on a powerful momentum that pushes individuals to the point where they may even consider suicide.

Signs of Suicidal ideation: Signs can differ from one person to another but here are the most common signs.

Speech:  People who are thinking about taking their own lives may express feelings of helplessness, being a burden to others, having no reason to live, and/or wishing to die.

Mood:  Anxiety, impatience, a lack of interest in past interests, feeling ashamed or angry, and melancholy are just a few of the moods that might show signs of suicidal thinking and intent in someone.

Behavior:  People who are thinking about taking their own lives may engage in certain activities, such as parting with valued items, isolating themselves from friends and family, visiting strangers to bid them farewell, and looking up how to do it online. Additionally, they might use drugs and alcohol more frequently, conduct recklessly, act angrily, or sleep poorly or too much.

Eating Disorder: A variety of psychiatric illnesses called eating disorders can lead to the development of unhealthful eating patterns. They could begin with a fixation on food, their weight, or their body type.

common types of Eating Disorders: 

Anorexia Nervosa: People with anorexia generally view themselves as overweight, even if they’re dangerously underweight. They tend to constantly monitor their weight, avoid eating certain types of foods, and severely restrict their calorie intake.

Bulimia Nervosa: entails repeated and frequent episodes of eating exceptionally large amounts of food, which are followed by compensatory behaviors including fasting, purging, or overexercising.

Binge Eating Disorder: The signs of this disorder are comparable to those of bulimia or the anorexic binge eating subtype.
For instance, they frequently feel out of control while bingeing and eat unusually big quantities of food in comparatively short amounts of time. People with binge eating disorders do not control calories or engage in purging activities to make up for their binges, such as vomiting or excessive exercise.

Phase 3: Scenarios. 

Anxiety: you have an exam at 6:00 pm and you are very stressed and feel that you didn’t study well. You have 2 choices either to attend your lectures and not revise for the exam because you don’t have time or skip your lectures and stay home studying for the exam. 

1st choice outcome: you become more stressed about your exam, you’re tired and not completely focused on the exam so you end up not performing well in the exam which is reflected in your grade. 

2nd choice: you revised well, you’re full of energy and completely focused on the exam, but you lost participation grades in the classes that you missed.  

Suicide ideation: you have a friend who lately becomes introverted and feels down all the time. He has a notebook that he is always writing in it, he left it in front of you and you took it and read it, and you found out that he has suicidal ideations. You have 2 choices: confront him that you knew and offer help or tell her parents. 

1st choice’s outcome: this made him more stressed and angry that you invaded his privacy, but he accepted your help and opened up with you about his thoughts so you had the ability to help him. 

2nd choice’s outcome: your friend has a family that doesn’t have any mental health awareness so they refused to help him and punished him.

Eating disorder: you had a car accident and your doctor recommended you stay at home for more than a month so you started eating too much than usual without any activity or movement. You gained a lot of weight. You have 2 choices: go to a nutritionist and try to lose this weight again, but you aren’t willing to go on a diet. Or try to adapt to the weight you gained and accept your body saying that the car accident is the reason and that you had no choice. 

1st choice’s outcome: your nutritionist made you start a diet, but you didn’t get good results quickly which made you lose motivation.

2nd choice’s outcome: you gained more weight and started to be rejected by people around you which resulted in being depressed and having 2 problems which are an eating disorder and depression.  

Reference list: 

https://www.cdc.gov/mentalhealth/learn/index.htm

Top 5 Mental Health Challenges Facing College Students and How to Get Help

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/common-eating-disorders#-3.-Binge-eating-disorder

https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/generalised-anxiety-disorder/overview/#:~:text=Anxiety%20is%20a%20feeling%20of,medical%20test%20or%20job%20interview.