Camille Valentine
Professor Fino-Murtaugh
Eng 160-29
Nov 18, 2022
Covid-19 wasn’t the Only Pandemic
While 2020 wasn’t the greatest year with the spread of Covid going global, along with other events such as the death of Kobe Bryant, the stock market crash, the unreasonable death of black americans, murder hornets, explosions, wild fires, and so many more that made that year a living hell. To make matters worse there was another less talked about crisis coming from the wings, the mental health crisis was expanding and affecting millions. Isolation made the world go deranged making mental illness numbers reach their peak. As time went on it only got worse, in 2021 most people couldn’t take the guidelines and isolation, they only saw one way out. An article posted by the CDC states that suicide rates increased by 50,000, or statistically, 4%; the highest rate increase ever in suicide, especially amoung young men ages 15-24, prime college age (“Suicide Data and Statistics | Suicide”).
Mental illness among young adults and college students has become a global pandemic in itself across the globe. In an PubMed article, a government website, states, “About 14% of the global burden of disease has been attributed to neuropsychiatric disorders, mostly due to the chronically disabling nature of mental disorders,”… (Prince). This article was written in 2007, over a decade ago and mental health cases have only increased since then so just imagine the percentage now; after a global pandemic. This pandemic has turned into a crisis and the most at risk are young adults, aka, college students.
I believe the worst part of this whole situation is the government and those in power know of this crisis and all they do is put up commercials and ads about how “we are all in this together” stated by the CDC and the Ad Council everytime we turn on our TVs. Yes we are, but people are actually suffering and surcoming to suicide because they aren’t getting the help they need. It isn’t that they don’t want to, it is because of expenses, we are in college we have barely enough money to feed ourselves. College students; our future politicians, scientists, teachers, artists, and so many more that we will all need some day are suffering in astronomical ways. But since they can’t get the help they need now, how will we survive throughout the next generation? The mental health crisis isn’t even being acknowledged let alone supported, making it more stressful for people suffering. Yes, there is help out there, some campuses have plans and programs in place to help students for free, like SUNY New Paltz, but what about the hundreds of colleges that don’t have that, this is a global crisis and it is just starting to catch wind.
I am lucky enough to go to SUNY New Paltz, they have free medical care that comes with our tuition, but that should be a basic policy for all colleges. Some say that the option for free medical services on campus are too expensive and will just raise tuition rates, but that’s not the case, I go to a State University, one of the cheaper of the options when it comes to colleges and even they can put aside money and funds for us to have free access for our medical needs may it be physical or mental. Even if they have to take away some funding from other programs, I am telling you, everyone on campus; students, professors, and every other campus worker would be okay with it if it means the students get better, free health care. Even a simple google search like seen in Figure one will show you that New Paltz has done a lot in the aspect of mental health services on campus and online (other colleges, take notes). Everything from telehealth to open door policy for anyone who needs to talk to a professional at anytime (SUNY New Paltz). Colleges all around the state, country, and world should and can afford at least one therapist for students, even one psychiatrist. We the students are suffering and struggling to survive due to our own minds and everyone, meaning the older generations, sits back and lets it happen.
Accepting and talking about what is happening is the first step but even that isn’t happening and thousands of colleges watch as their students take their own lives. “Acknowledging the antecedents of the current student mental-health landscape does not diminish the seriousness of the current problem. If anything, it adds a further note of pessimism: Experts have been trying to confront student anxiety for over half a century without reversing the tide” (Stearns). It can only get worse from here if this problem isn’t even talked about but at this point it isn’t even being noticed. You could argue there are things out there like hotlines and programs but I didn’t even find out about them until I did my research for this essay, people in crisis, especially students, won’t go to google and look up a place near them to help when in the middle of a panic or anxiety attack. They should know what’s out there already, there should be signs, buildborders, flyers, it should be part of the orientation presentations, not hidden like it’s some shameful thing.
Covid and isolation made the whole untalked about subject that much worse. There is actually a Covid hotline, not for questions about corona virus, but a suicide/mental health hotline dedicated for people who were suffering from the pandemic and isolation, which by the way here is the hotline: 1-888-364-3065. But it doesn’t help much when the link underneath the hotline is a direct website to information on Covid-19. Because of course when you’re in a mental crisis while in isolation the one thing you need to know is if you have symptoms of Coronavirus. Also, let’s go back to the commercials, even the CDC and the government knew of the mental health crisis during covid, they made the hotlines, and they played commercials constantly about the mental health hotlines and with the neverending saying “We are all in this together”. Then as soon as the pandemic let up it’s as if it never happened, because to the world, covid was the pandemic, but in reality we are and have been in an ongoing pandemic that is the mental health crisis.
2020 wasn’t a great year, and it will go down in history as probably one of the worst years ever, but there was and still is a bigger issue at hand, mental health is a real problem and our future is at stake. I was one of many that had suffered enormously during Covid with my mental health. I was lucky enough to have help but what about the students who didn’t have anyone by them, in isolation, most probably didn’t make it.
Even though I had my mom I couldn’t go to a hospital to be admitted to the psych ward, I suffered for months with suicidal thoughts because no psychiatristist would see me since covid was still around. To be exact I was kept as an out-patient from my local hospital for four months and one week. They would call me everyday a 9 am to make sure I had not surcome to the suicidal thoughts, ask me if my thoughts have gotten better or worse and then spend the rest of the day talking to my mother to see if there were any updates on a new telehealth psychiatrist who would take my insurance and who would start me on medication before seeing me in person. My nurse’s name was Marie and she along with my mother were the soul people keeping me alive for almost five months until we found my psychiatrist. Just imagining what I went through and thinking about the 50,000 students (“Suicide Data and Statistics | Suicide”) who had no one in isolation alone, suffering and surcoming to suicide, breaks my heart.
This should have been stopped way before covid but we are almost three years past the start of the pandemic and nothing has been done. There are options out there, resources, and no one, and I mean no one is advertising them and letting them be known. The suffering of young adults today is unmatched to anything else and should be colleges, states, and the whole country’s number one priority.
Figure 1
Works Cited
Prince, Martin. “No health without mental health.” PubMed, 8 September 2007, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17804063/. Accessed 11 November 2022.
Stearns, Peter N. A ‘Crisis’ of Student Anxiety?: The Challenges to Student Mental Health are Real. they are also Decades in the Making. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2022. ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/docview/2725162857/5A1D1FBFB0194E9EPQ/3?parentSessionId=pE8n3x1RvmMEqsYucPdOyIvNTS9br1iVqiyQK1vDQuU%3D.
“Suicide Data and Statistics | Suicide.” CDC, 28 June 2022, https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/suicide-data-statistics.html. Accessed 11 November 2022.