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Introduction

One of the main causes of stress is getting used to the new life which we have suddenly landed in. For most college students it’s the first time that they have lived outside the nurturing and protective security of the family unit. Their parents used to provide for them materially and used to set down boundaries on how to live. This no longer applies in college and one of the first tasks that they should undertake is to find an identity and effectively test the rules that were set out by their parents.



The uncertainty and lack of identity is a common cause of stress for them. School-related issues also cause stress for students these days. It can be caused by them doing so badly in college that they gave up all hope of doing something worthwhile with their lives, or it could be caused by just not living up to their own standards. Stress also creates the way people deal with things like smoking and drinking, which are worse ways of dealing with stress. These things sometimes lead college students to become depressed. Sometimes the multitude of life’s changes that occur during your college years can trigger serious depression.



The college atmosphere can be detrimental to someone dealing with depression because social life revolves around “keggers”, parties and going to bars. Because alcohol is a depressant, it only deepens the depression and hides its symptoms. When college students first became depressed, they tend to spend their weekends drinking. It consumes them throughout the week as they “suffer” through classes they have signed up for, when Sunday evenings came around and the weekend is typically over, and the depression comes back as it once did, or in some cases it comes back worse then before.



According to a study done in 2003 by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, alcohol-dependent individuals are almost 4 times more likely to have a major depressive disorder than those who are not dependent. The study also found that alcohol abuse was more common among students who had been diagnosed with depression than among those who had not. Alcohol and some drugs are very desirable to college students because it gets rid of the anxiety and stress of what they are doing in college. But most do not know that once the effects of these drugs disappear the depression comes back and they’re only left with that until they get their next drink or their next hit. But sometimes it’s just not enough to keep them from committing suicide.



Suicide is the second leading cause of death for college students. And the number one cause of suicide for college student suicides as well as suicides in general is untreated depression. Going to college can be a difficult transition period in which students may feel lost, lonely, confused, anxious, inadequate, and stressed. And these problems may lead to depression. And again, untreated depression is the number one cause for suicide.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

New Findings: Stress


Fifty years ago Stress would have been the main title of a newspaper after president of the American Physiological Society Walter Bradford Cannon established the definition of stress while working towards his “fight or flight” idea.

Born in Wisconsin in 1871, Walter Bradford Cannon was ahead of times, predicting what has become an epidemic of stress. Going to school in the top educational systems such as Harvard University it is not shocking to find out that he would alter graduate college in 1900 to get his medical degree. With this medical degree, he was able to start on research, working with the “fight or flight” and animals responses to threats. It was from his research in this area that he founded the basis of stress.

His research has lead many scholars towards working with stress in different situations from work to school where they would soon find the effects of stress and usage of many drugs in order to lower stress levels, depression rates and suicide that would soon be the newest epidemic of the college life. Without Walter Bradford Cannon, those days when your back kills and you can’t sleep at night would be a reason for doctor visits rather than a relaxation time.
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