Dr Yousuf Ali Al mulla
At universities or colleges, there is a uniquely difficult time for many young students, may be not always parents or senior family members could be aware of it and what is going on behind the scenes!
At the university stage, an individual may face grade deal of pressure and challenges that pose a variety of physical and emotional difficulties. Unfortunately, upon my personal observation and what have heard that mental health problem among university student are increasing in numbers as well as in severity, so have these universities or academic institutions consider this issue and try to solve it?
I believe that most of us have heard that students often claim to experience stress, anxiety, symptoms of depression, eating problems, and other psychological issues, which have a serious negative impact on student academic performance and may also their mental health with time.
Overall, prevalence of worsening mental health among the students looking to different study worldwide, was interestingly showing how the university students facing and how mental health problems may get them end with loneliness and major depressive symptoms. However, I should say that most of the students who have problems do not receive any therapeutic or counseling services and why some universities have attained very little attention to their students, which led at the end to both short and long term consequences including decreasing work capacity and poor academic performance.
What I would like to emphasize here that those students have ended with increased drug addiction, alcohol use, and low self-esteem, so have these academic institutes provided and create an effective counseling system for their students, looking to facts that over 800 universities worldwide have categorized the student mental health problems, what they are facing into following patterns of problems emerged namely; sense of being dysfunctional, loss of confidence, lack of self-regulation and anxiety proneness.
Moreover, it seems to be that first-year students arriving at university or college are most students who report a mental health condition and sometimes we cannot blame them, as attending the university means moving away from home, becoming more independent and managing your own finance, not forgetting to mention that sexual transmitted disease and sometime sexual behaviors can be as well a concern.
However, here I would say the university priority and importance of the need to reinforce healthy behaviors in wards and in practice. So while universities or any academic institute might offer advice on sleep, nutrition, physical activity, stress management and coping strategies, they should also help such students to act on this advice.
I do urge the academic institutes to design a mental health treatment services, in collaboration with student families and not to leave the students suffer in silence as we see nowadays, as one of the most dangerous aspect of depression and mental health concerns in general is suicide.
It is neither an exaggeration nor is it alarmist to claim that there is a mental health crisis today facing the college students, but I believe the overall picture now clear. If so, the next question is what we should do about it.
Dr. Yousuf Ali Al Mulla. MD, Ministry of Health, is a medical innovator and educator. For any queries regarding the content of the column, he can be contacted at: [email protected]
