Disordered eating has been trending on social media since the early 2010s, but now it wears a new deceptive mask
cw: eating disorders
Approximately one million Canadians have been diagnosed with an eating disorder. Teens and young adults are the most at risk groups. Women are particularly vulnerable as they make up approximately 80 per cent of patients. The risk of developing an eating disorder is further heightened by social media trends that glorify unhealthy eating.
The ‘girl dinner’ trend went viral on TikTok this past summer and remains popular on the for you page. ‘Girl dinner’ started as a joke where young women and girls were showing weird combinations of food they put together as meals. However, the trend quickly slipped into the dangerous territory of disordered eating. People now use it to show off their tiny portions of food. Dinner implies a full meal, but many ‘girl dinners’ are barely a snack.
When ‘girl dinner’ first started promoting unsafe behaviours, I was reminded of the eating disorder culture that ran rampant on Tumblr in the early 2010s. Both ‘girl dinner’ and the pro-anorexia rhetoric from Tumblr encourage people to obsess over lowering calorie intake to obtain the ‘ideal body.’
Although awareness has increased, the culture has not changed. If anything, it is more pervasive and even deceptive. In the 2010s it was easy to discern what posts promoted eating disorders and unattainable bodies. For example, the quote “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’ was popularized in 2009 by Kate Moss.
Today, it is much trickier to identify certain trends as problematic. ‘Girl dinner’ falls into this category of deception for two reasons.
First, it started as a joke. These meals were not intended to be taken seriously. However, calling a cheese string, five strawberries, and two hardboiled eggs a dinner sends out a harmful message. Some even started calling crying, vaping, and sleeping a ‘girl dinner.’ There are even ‘girl dinner’ filters on TikTok. Several of the options include things like medication, cocktails, and condiments. These are not meals.
Second, ‘girl dinner’ is linked to a broader trend of using the word ‘girl’ as an adjective in phrases like girl dinner, hot girl summer, and girl math. Typically, ‘girl’ has been used to devalue womens’ abilities. Now, the term is being used to reclaim feminine energy and activities. However, in doing so the dangerous implications of ‘girl dinner’ have been harder to discern.
‘Girl dinner’ wears a deceptive mask so it is critical to take a step back and analyze the issues with this trend and others like it.
Several eating disorders, including anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating disorder have been listed with symptomatic criteria in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental illness. Collectively, eating disorders are among the deadliest mental illnesses. Disordered eating should never be promoted.
Tumblr was a breeding ground for eating disorders, hating one’s body, and abusing food intake to change one’s appearance. Social media is likely the reason why every single woman in my life has suffered from an eating disorder or has shown signs of disordered eating. Every single woman.
I was young teen when eating disorder culture spread like wildfire on Tumblr. Being bombarded with unhealthy images, quotes, and blogs contributed to my personal struggles with food. It is my hope that McMaster students and Generation Z alike can be the ones to end this cycle of toxicity, and this starts with calling out ‘girl dinner’ for what it is - a trend glorifying mental illness.
If you are struggling with an eating disorder McMaster University’s Student Wellness Centre offers resources to help you find trusted support for you or a friend in need. The National Eating Disorder Information Centre offers a helpline, information, and referrals. The NEDIC also offers resources specifically for racialized community members.
If you need urgent care, St. Joseph’s Healthcare in Hamilton has an Eating Disorder Program to help treat and guide anyone 16 or older. The program does require a referral from your doctor, but St Joseph’s has a self-assessment to guide you towards the treatment necessary for you. Please remember that you are never alone.
From stigmatized to glorified, perceptions of mental illness shifted from one extreme to another
cw: suicide, mental illness
About seven and a half million children and youth up to the age of 25 suffer from mental illness in Canada. Mental illness is serious, debilitating and life-altering.
As discussions of mental health have continued to shift away from stigmatization, there has also been a shift towards the glorification of mental illness, particularly in the media.
Though there is a stark contrast between stigmatization and glorification, both processes inherently amplify the attention directed toward an individual’s mental illness, disregarding the other attributes that make that person who they are.
Though there is a stark contrast between stigmatization and glorification, both processes inherently amplify the attention directed toward an individual’s mental illness, disregarding the other attributes that make that person who they are.
Particularly, in the media and among young adults, mental illness is gaining recognition as a desirable quality. Posts on social media romanticizing and glamourizing these conditions are growing, but at a cost for those who are truly suffering.
Circulating media glamourizing and misrepresenting mental illness have also promoted the notion that a diagnosis defines an individual and contributed to a culture where mental illness is trendy and something that should be coveted.
Our society has the tendency to extract a few socially acceptable traits from prevalent mental illnesses while completely overlooking the larger associated range of clinical symptoms. For instance, anxiety is reduced to simply being shy or introverted and depression is characterised as sadness. These stereotypes obscure the reality that anxiety and depression — the most common mental illnesses in the world — severely impair an individual’s ability to perform daily tasks.
Even in day-to-day conversations, comments like “my OCD is so bad today”, as an expression to convey a desire for tidiness, minimize the experience of having a mental illness such as obsessive-compulsive disorder which can involve immense fear, stress and doubt that make daily life challenging and miserable. These comments can have grave consequences and may be potentially triggering to those who are suffering from the illness.
Viewing mental illness as something to be sought-after is a detrimental mindset even for those who are not affected by it. Studies have found that alluring depictions of mental illness in social media and other forms of media can lead to a strong yearning for mental illnesses and associated behaviours among young adults. Specifically, with suicide and self-harm, aesthetic posts with quotes framing suicidal individuals as “angels that want to go home” romanticize and encourage the perception that mental illness is something that is “tragically beautiful”.
Clearly, there is still a lack of knowledge surrounding mental illnesses among the public and the misrepresentation and glorification of these illnesses is only setting us back.
Clearly, there is still a lack of knowledge surrounding mental illnesses among the public and the misrepresentation and glorification of these illnesses is only setting us back.
With World Suicide Prevention Day having just passed and this week being Mental Health Awareness week, along with declining mental health among post-secondary students, we need to recognize the harms of glorifying mental illness and work to continue de-stigmatizing the issue by promoting awareness, acceptance and more importantly, advocacy for action. Our governments, institutions and organizations also have a tremendous role to play in making mental health supports accessible for all individuals.
If you or someone you know is in need of mental health support, please know that there are ways to get help. McMaster University’s Student Wellness Centre and the Canadian Mental Health Association offer a variety of resources, services and information that may help you begin prioritizing your mental health and well-being.
If you are in need of more urgent services, the McMaster Students Union Student Assistance Program provides all McMaster students with access to 24/7 multilingual mental health support from professional counsellors at no cost. To get help immediately, please call or text 1-888-377-0002.
The mental illness label can have tremendous impacts and we should approach it with more care
By: Frank Chen, Contributor
CW: mentions of mental illness
Veterans of university know: this late-November to mid-December stretch is not a good time of the year. As midterms wrap up and exam season ramps into full gear, this is the point where students become overwhelmed, burnt out and exhausted. Yet, we have some of the most important examinations ahead. Especially in this “unprecedented” year, the burden on students is massive, and the McMaster University community has been vocal about it.
At the forefront of this is a discussion regarding student mental health. Over the past year, the ideas of mental health and mental illness have been thrown around a lot by students. Students are increasingly expressing loneliness, reporting frustration with coursework and burning out. As a result of those feelings, I’ve seen more and more people labelling themselves as depressed or anxious. But “mental illness” is a term with a lot more weight than many people realize.
When the “mental illness” tag is put on you, it’s often seen as a fixed state — a never-ending onslaught of “bad” mental health. It becomes easy to stop appreciating the good parts of your life when you fixate on the idea that you are “mentally unfit.” Regardless of illness or not, there can be real harm done just by the label itself.
As an example, in my first year of university (which was in person), I bought into the idea that my stresses and insecurities were a form of generalized anxiety disorder. Due to this, I put boundaries on how I could or could not act based on what I thought of my own mental state. This took away so many possibilities.
Instead, I now realize how my stresses in my first year could be reframed as a normal response to a change of environment and an adaptation to university life. But regardless, my belief of having anxiety limited me and it can be incredibly easy to misjudge these negative emotions to mental illness.
Both my personal experience and some of the nuances in how students talk about mental illness illustrate an important idea: that our view of mental illness can be incredibly individualized. In stressful situations that evoke emotional responses and actions, we often miscategorize our failings to ourselves rather than a product of our environment.
For example, students often blame themselves for their grades, for not being prepared enough or for not being that star student who can simultaneously juggle many commitments. However, what we fail to consider are the social contexts that we are in that often make it difficult to achieve these standards, such as home conditions, family duties or socioeconomic status.
In stressful situations that evoke emotional responses and actions, we often miscategorize our failings to ourselves rather than a product of our environment.
Similarly, students also often talk about mental health as a dichotomous issue, as either having good or bad mental health, which inherently puts pressure on themselves to “fix” their mental states. But realistically, everyone has good and bad days, largely influenced by the events and activities taking place that day. Mental health is less a fixed state based on your own failures, but rather something that is constantly fluctuating largely influenced by your surroundings.
Our individualized view of mental illness poses danger for those caught up in it. Mental health when approached from the view that it’s the fault of the individual can often lead to a vicious cycle where mental illness can lead to self-doubt and self-hate, furthering negative self-perceptions. The label of illness can be hard to escape from, but social context is key when approaching the way you feel. Understanding that the vast majority of signs and symptoms of what you may think is illness can actually come as normal responses to stressful contexts.
It can be hard to step back and convince yourself that social contexts can play the role it does. Historically, mental health as a discipline has been rooted in individualism, harkening back to the days when disabled people, 2SLGBTQIA+ folks and others who were deemed socially undesirable were blamed for their “mental illness.”
Mental illness was used as a tool to control those who didn’t conform to social standards set at the time, their purpose was originally to condemn the individual. In part, it’s this long-standing history of individualized mental illness that contributes to why so many people still think of it this way today.
With the impending exam season, we need to be more aware of the implications of a term like “mental illness.” As we move into a stressful time for students and educators alike, I hope that we can all consider whether those negative thoughts and emotions are truly arising from mental illness or something else — because it can be very easy to misattribute feelings as disease, when there can be bigger and broader social contexts in play.
By Mads Clement, Contributor
cw: mental health, suicide
In 2018, the Student Representative Assembly voted to rescind the Peer Support Line (PSL), an anonymous hotline that existed to support students and their mental health.
PSL offered students a place to chat with another student trained in peer support about difficulties that they were experiencing. These challenges could range from relationship issues to academic problems.
According to a former vice president (administration) of the McMaster Students Union, the main reason the PSL was rescinded was because it received too many “crisis calls”, which posed a liability to all parties involved. Given student staff were not trained in crisis management or how to address calls with students experiencing suicidal ideation, this is a reasonable concern.
WGEN is a peer support and community building space on the second floor of the student centre.
However, closing a mental health-based service has had negative impacts on the student body. We have lost one more resource on our already very small list of mental health resources. Anonymous peer support is extremely valuable. These services can be accessed without the fear of your name being officially attached to your mental health issues and because peers can relate to you on levels that adult therapists often cannot. Having someone who can relate to you without worrying about whether you will be institutionalized is an important facet of mental health care.
For these reasons and many others, students were outraged by the closing of PSL. We took to Twitter and Facebook, asking for answers as to why such a valuable service would be rescinded. It’s hard to find mental health care on campus, and reducing our options makes it even harder.
I actually received a reply from a member of the SRA to my outraged tweets where they wrote; “actually, there are 4 new counsellors that have been added to increase 4,000 hours of counselling to decrease the waiting time that students face when accessing the Student Wellness Centre.”
There are three main reasons why this resolution is an issue.
Problem number one: as mentioned above, going to a therapist is not the ideal option for everyone, as some students are likely to have minimal shared experiences with therapists. This especially applies to marginalized folks; patients of colour are less likely to find a racialized therapist that understands the impacts of systemic racism on their mental health. 2SLGBTQ+ students face a similar struggle when dealing with cisgender, heterosexual therapists. The same can be said of various other marginalized identities.
The second problem is that four more therapists isn’t enough. Ask anyone who goes to therapy at the SWC about how long they wait for appointments. In the majority of cases, there’s a two week to one month gap in between appointments. This is not adequate. On top of that, the therapists and counsellors are so swamped with students that they rarely have time to dedicate care to their patients beyond a surface level interaction. Mental health problems often run a lot deeper than what therapists are able to deal with because of their volume of patients.
Since there are many students floundering for mental health care outside of the SWC and PSL, more pressure has been put on the MSU peer support services: Women and Gender Equity Network, the Pride Community Centre, Student Health Education Centre and Maccess. These services, like PSL, are run by students who have entry level peer support training and are not compensated for their work. They are not equipped to handle the volume of students coming to them for help, let alone the degree of mental distress some of their space users are in. These students are not trained therapists.
Additionally, the majority of students that volunteer for these services are marginalized, which leads to the issue of marginalized students taking on all the mental health work on campus. These students, because of the pressures in their own lives and the added pressures of dealing with the mental health crises of others that they can’t always handle, often develop their own mental health problems and also need support or therapy. This system is unbalanced and unsustainable.
We need a balance of both therapists and peer support services. Therapists can provide specialized care to those who need it, but they are at capacity at McMaster University right now. We need more therapists; specifically therapists who have experiences with marginalization. It’s super weird talking about institutionalized transphobia with a cisgender, heterosexual person. This needs to change.
In addition, the MSU peer support services need more funding and volunteers should be compensated for their work. They put hours of unpaid labour into an unforgiving system that does not support them.
McMaster needs to rework its mental health support systems, and it needs to do this as urgently as possible. Everyone suffers when mental health services are limited, not just mentally ill folks.
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By: Rosemarie O’Shea
For many users, the birth control pill’s side effects pose problems beyond spotting and migraines. The pill’s effects on the mental health of women are now being more widely discussed than ever. More women are opening up about their birth control experiences and how it has taken a toll on their mental wellbeing.
A quick YouTube search results in various videos titled along the lines of “Why I quit the pill”, where one video is even titled and thoroughly capitalized “THE PILL IS MAKING ME CRAZY. I QUIT”. Despite all this discussion in the social sphere, the medical research in comparison appears to be lacking.
Upon being made available to Canadians since 1960, the pill quickly became the country’s most popular form of reversible contraception. Now, more than 100 million women worldwide use the oral contraceptive pill to prevent pregnancy or control their menstruation.
Birth control pills contain varying levels of the hormones estrogen and progestin, the synthetic version of progesterone, a natural sex hormone. They prevent the release of the egg to stop ovulation from occurring, whilst also thickening the cervical mucus so that sperm cells are unable to enter the fallopian tubes. Both tactics minimize the chances of the egg meets sperm fertilization fairy tale. Provided it is taken correctly, the pill’s efficiency rate is stated to be 99 per cent effective.
Of course, almost every medication comes with its own set of side effects. The most commonly reported repercussions of the pill include intermenstrual spotting, nausea, breast tenderness and migraines. Slotted amongst these physical reactions, the ever-ominous sounding ‘mood changes’ is also listed.
These ‘mood changes’ are reflected in the most common reason for women to stop taking or change the pill they are using – its ramifications on their mental health.
In the 1970s, women protested for more information to be made available about the side effects of the pill as there were increasing reports of women suffering from heart conditions in connection to it. Eventually, the Food and Drug Administration required manufacturers to include inserts, within its packaging, listing the pill’s side effects and risks.
The FDA also required that the pill’s formula contain a significantly less amount of estrogen which has resulted in a lower risk of cardiovascular events and emergence of cancers. However, the connection between usage and increased risk of experiencing mental health issues weren’t legitimately addressed.
Recent studies have determined a link between the changes in hormone levels and the extent of anxiety and depression prevalent such as in premenstrual syndrome. Furthermore, the progesterone hormone has been shown to induce depression while its synthetic version, progestin, has been discovered to result in the decreased production of serotonin which is the hormone responsible for feelings of wellbeing.
Finding an ethical method of proving the cause and effect relationship between the pill and deteriorating mental health has stunted research in the field as the distribution of placebo pills to study subjects would result in unwanted pregnancies. Though, a study involving celibate subjects would face no ethical deliberation.
The issue remains that the advancement of medical technology concerning all categories that the pill’s side effect falls into: mental health, contraceptive technology and women’s health. Funding for such research is simply inefficient in times where it is most needed and expected by many.
Moreover, there is a consistency in the medical community’s reluctance to connect the pill with mental health issues, despite the large quantity of claims that have supported the correlation. Such reluctance possibly stems from the pill’s profit and value as a commodity.
It also seems to be the most accessible form of contraception to many and, so, slandering its brand so to speak may appear as a brash move.
With so many women experiencing heightened mental health issues in connection to their usage of the pill, this is an issue that needs addressing within the medical community. While the government are pushing more funding into mental health awareness, this problem continues to grow without being adequately addressed by research.
It’s time to shift the focus from dealing with the issues at hand after they conspire to looking at preventative measures that will protect users. The pill and its implications need to be more well researched and users must be informed. It’s time for the medical community to listen to women’s experiences, as neglecting their health and wellbeing is not an option.
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On Jan. 30, the annual Bell Let’s Talk Day, an advertising campaign created by Bell Canada, took the country by storm. In an effort to raise awareness and combat stigma surrounding mental health in Canada, Bell donated money to mental health funds for every social interaction with campaigns hashtag.
While the world tweeted, snapped and Instagram-ed away, The McMaster Women’s Athletic Leadership Committee took it one step further and hosted their first-ever Bell Let’s Talk event.
The event consisted of McMaster student-athletes sharing their personal stories in an open and safe environment that was open to the entire McMaster community. Five student-athletes, Sabrina Schindel, Allison Sippel, Aurora Zuraw, Nicolas Belliveau and Louis Sharland, took the floor and led discussions on depression, eating disorders, language and anxiety and men’s mental health.
http://www.instagram.com/p/BtRPDA0BkSb/
The event was a success with a great turn out that included open discussion and much-needed conversations on mental health and how it affects athletes, in addition to the right steps that need to be taken to combat different stigmas.
“At first, I was expecting it to be a small event with just members of WALC, but to have my teammates, friends and people I didn’t even know come out to support was so amazing and inspiring,” said Sippel, the initiator for the event.
The idea for the event came up after Sippel, a cross-country runner, wanted to be able to create an open space for people to be able to talk about their battles with mental health.
“I feel like if we are able to create a space where people are open to talking, there would be less of a stigma around it,” said Sippel.
She first wrote down her story after she got out of the hospital after suffering from an eating disorder. After reading it to her close friends and family members, she never really shared it with the public. But when the idea of creating an event for Bell Let’s Talk came up, the idea of the panel sharing personal stories came to mind.
Working with Claire Arsenault, McMaster’s Athlete Services Coordinator and WALC, the panel that would originally be a conversation for members of the committee grew to more.
“I was happy that male athletes joined in and it was really inspirational that the group of us could be able to share our stories,” said Sippel.
🗣️ #OneTeamForMentalHealth 🗣️
Ask someone how they are doing.
📸 @MPHcentral#WeAreONE | #BellLetsTalk pic.twitter.com/OlmEeBWH9r
— Ontario University Athletics (@OUAsport) January 31, 2019
Each speaker shared their story then opened up the floor for discussion, answering questions in regard to their experiences, advice for others and much more.
During the panel, Sippel shared her story about how her eating disorder led her to be hospitalized when she was 14 years old. After losing too much weight and no longer being allowed to run, her journey to bounce back was not easy.
“This illness had turned mind against body and person against person because nurses were trained to trust no one,” Sippel explained about her time in the hospital.
Eventually, Sippel showed signs of improvement and was allowed to leave the hospital and return to her everyday life. Fast-forward to today, and she is now running on the Mac cross-country team while trying her best to stay on top of her condition.
“It’s a lifetime of fighting against my mind so I never had to go back,” Sippel said.
For Sippel, having the student-athletes lead this conversation was important for a number of reasons.
“I feel like a lot of times, it is frowned upon to express our feelings. If we start the conversation, there is no better way to set an example for our fellow students,” said Sippel. “Hopefully five students sharing their stories can spiral into something bigger and start a movement.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/BtREZWEh1QA/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet
Schindel, another one of the five student-athletes who shared their stories, is a lacrosse player who suffered from depression. Through the ups and downs of dealing with her battle, she eventually discovered that staying busy and active is what kept helped her out the most. This meant that when her lacrosse season was over, she would have to find something to keep her occupied so she did not fall down that dark hole again.
“Realizing that no one is beyond help and getting in front of my depression before it could do the same damage it used to,” Schindel explained as the steps she takes to keep herself from falling again.
Schindel’s story, though devastating, is more common amongst young people than one may think. This is why it is so important that these conversations are happening. Having the bravery to start the conversation, and sharing tips and resources with their fellow students is a great way for Marauders to do their part in helping end the stigma surrounding mental health.
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You’re having one of those days where it seems as if the whole world has teamed up to make your life miserable and revel in the aftermath. One of those Murphy’s Law days when everything and anything that could go wrong is going wrong.
On those days, it doesn’t take much to push you off the edge – a jerk’s offhand comment in the elevator, a long line for food, or loud people in lecture. For the approximately eight percent of adults that the Canadian Mental Health Association cites as suffering from depression, this is a daily reality – a lethargy that bleeds into weeks, months, even years. Depression is not one-size-fits-all. It is different for every person. Yet it is as if there is some indescribable shift – a gear changing cogs – that causes your brain and body to run on ten percent of what it used to.
Like depression, anxiety disorders don’t discriminate based on age, gender, race or religion. Both are very real problems, and ones that need to be talked about openly. Too many times people hide their disease. When a friend asks why your eyes are bloodshot or if the bruises under your eyes are an indication of how much sleep you have been getting, the answer is “I think I’m coming down with something.”
The reality is that you have been sick for a while, just in a way that somehow seems less acceptable to voice. This has to stop. When people have pneumonia, they get antibiotics that clear up their lungs and help them breathe again. While people are not generally shy to say they have pneumonia, they are much more reluctant to claim that they have depression or anxiety. Which means that pneumonia gets treated, and depression and anxiety do not.
The Canadian Mental Health Association cites that once recognized, treatment can make a difference for 80 percent of people suffering from depression, allowing them to resume their daily lives. Yet five bullet points down is another staggering statistic. Only one in five children who need mental health services get the appropriate care. This discrepancy is a huge warning alarm demanding to be addressed.
To tackle this issue, we must attack at the root, the perception of mental illnesses. The circulation of phrases like “yesterday was such a rough day, I was super depressed” and “your text gave me a panic attack” does two things. It diminishes the gravity of depression and anxiety disorders as mental illnesses. Reducing a serious illness to the same lines as a bad day discounts the daily struggle to do something as simple as getting out of bed. Secondly, by misusing the terminology of these disorder in colloquial speech, it makes people retreat further into their shells. It makes sense that nobody wants to come out and admit that they need help when the people they are confessing to are the same ones throwing around jokes.
We need a society where someone is comfortable responding to “what did you do last night?” with “I was at the therapist’s office.” It is hard not to go through something like that and not feel alienated from the world. There are surprising amounts of people that go to see therapists but mask it with trips to the mall or the library. The problem is not the visits to the therapist. Those visits are intrinsic to the healing process in the same way that Tylenol relieves a chronic headache. To the people who are seeing or have seen therapists, you are infinitely brave for taking that step. The road to recovery is long and arduous, but what matters is that you are on this road. The problem comes in this desire to mask these visits, and what it is that leads people to feel like they have to.
The signs for a forward movement are there. We are coming fresh off of a week where Bell Let’s Talk promoted a culture of open discussion about mental health. The important thing is to keep the momentum going past those 24 hours. Depression and anxiety last much longer than that.
We need a paradigm shift in the way that mental disorders are viewed. It starts with every person accepting personal responsibility for those around us. We are not islands cut off from others. Our actions affect those around us, even when we are not aware of it.
It starts with open and honest conversations, with acceptance and with the idea that we need to be mindful of others. Think twice before you mock someone for what they are wearing or for riding the elevator from the third floor, because to them it could be a big deal that they got dressed and onto that elevator at all.
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Winter can be a time of wondrous snow days, evenings by the fireplace, and Hallmark holidays. But in addition to the cheerful, colourful festivities of the season, the cold weather also brings forth an onset of cloudy, dark days that can be mirrored in emotions of hopelessness and depression.
The current school year has brought forth several candid confessions from Silhouette staff members and volunteers outlining the effects of an ongoing battle with mental illness. If you find this time of year tends to bring you down and affect your mood, here are a few tips that have worked, and continue to work, in helping me feel more like myself when dealing with depression and anxiety. I cannot guarantee that these will work for everyone, but making these changes have definitely helped me reduce my frequency of panic attacks, and revive the spring in my step when SAD has left me feeling hopeless.
Make time
When I first started speaking with friends who were also struggling with mental illness, one of the things we always seemed to have in common was an inability to keep a schedule. Sleeping was a challenge, making it to class was a burden, and for reasons unknown, we always forgot to eat. This year, I’ve started keeping a schedule that reminds me to keep up with my commitments and my necessary daily habits. It may seem like a pretty basic plan, but keeping a day planner and setting reminders on your phone will help you feel more organized and less stressed.
If you’re finding it difficult to make time for sleep, reschedule your life accordingly. If it takes you two hours to fall asleep, schedule in an extra two hours at bedtime. If you know you’re going to wake up at 3:00 in the morning, have a show queued on your laptop so you have something to lull you back to sleep again. Or even if you have the opposite problem and are sleeping too much, have a trusted friend or relative give you a call to remind you of the world outside your bedroom. Making time for sleep may require you to cut the time you spend on other commitments, but if you’re well rested, you’ll have more time and energy to get caught up the next day.
If you find that you’re forgetting about other important details in your life, such as eating or attending class, write everything down and check off each item as you go. It’s been about a year since I was diagnosed, and I still write down “Eat Lunch” in my day planner- but now I’ve yet to forget! Getting thrown off my school and eating schedules last year led to a drop in my grades and a rise in my weight. Not staying on schedule ended up giving me more worries on top of my pre-existing anxiety conditions. Having a visual outline for your day written on a calendar or in a planner will give you a better understanding of how much time you realistically have in a day.
Treat Yo’ Self
When you’re feeling down, you can’t waste time blaming yourself for your problems. Instead, treat yourself. Make yourself feel good about something rather than berating yourself into feeling worse.
Once a week, I schedule a two-hour time slot where I do something just for me. Put on some inspiring music (pro tip: avoid the Adeles and Lana Del Reys of the world), paint your nails, watch a movie, try a new recipe, do whatever it is that you wish you had more time for during the school year. It will be an instant pick me up that you’ll begin looking forward to every week.
Talk it Out
Talk to someone- a friend, a family member, a professional in the field, or even call a hotline if you don’t feel comfortable speaking with someone who knows you personally. If you’re bottling up your feelings, you’re hurting yourself and hurting others. Not only are you hindering your own chances of speaking about your problems and accepting them, you’re also preventing those around you from gaining a better understanding of what you’re going through.
Talking to yourself can even be a positive option. Don’t necessarily talk to yourself out loud, but writing in a journal or talking out your problems in your head can be beneficial in gaining a better understanding of what your stresses and upsets currently are.
Good Day Sunshine
Getting enough sunlight is crucial in keeping your mood bright. But if like myself you find yourself living, working, and spending a considerable number of classes in basements, you may need to resort to some synthetic forms of sunshine.
Going outside can be cringe-worthy when the term “Polar Vortex” has become a CP24 regular and frosted eyebrows have become a daily fashion statement. An alternative to the classic glowing orb is a sun lamp. I’ve recently ordered one (a little over $100 from Wal-Mart) and I’m highly anticipating its arrival. I’ve heard great things about its ability to both literally and figuratively brighten your day, and living in a basement, it’ll help my body rise naturally with the sun and create a natural schedule to follow.
If you find the darkness of the current weather is really affecting your mood and how you feel about getting out of bed in the morning, a sun lamp can be a beneficial step.
Be nice
Be nice to yourself and be nice to others. Have an inspiring quote set as your desktop background, or reflect on your accomplishments at the end of the day. Complimenting yourself may seem lame, but it will boost your spirits and help you look towards the positives of each day.
And while you’re flattering yourself, let those around you know how much they mean to you. Complimenting someone else will make you feel like a genuinely good person and will leave you feeling more grateful for positive relationships in your life that you may sometimes overlook. You’ll feel good about it, and any recipient of a validating comment or complimentary text message is bound to also benefit from the flattery.
Dealing with depression, anxiety or seasonal affective disorder can leave you feeling hopeless. But taking a few steps in the right direction may have you turning down a path of new hope.
Amanda Watkins
LifeStyle Editor
This time last year, I wasn’t completely myself.
Last November I had my first of many panic attacks. I was at my student house attempting to complete an essay that was due two days later, and I broke down. I lost control of my emotions and started screaming and crying. My housemate came rushing to my room because she thought someone had died. I called my parents and my dad drove from Mississauga to Hamilton to bring me home.
I felt hopeless. It was an immense and overwhelming stress and sadness that I couldn’t control no matter what I did.
I talked to my friends and family about the stress I was feeling, and they all assured me that this was a normal thing to happen to someone my age, and that I would bounce back in no time.
But I didn’t. The stress got worse, and suddenly what was once just mental frustration was beginning to disrupt my physical health. I couldn’t sleep, I would forget to eat, I started fainting and was rushed to the hospital on more than one occasion. I had lost control of myself, and thought that if I ignored the warning signs long enough, they would simply just disappear. In an attempt to turn my life back around, I resorted to unhealthy coping mechanisms that included repetitive, ritualized behavior, such as obsessive counting and forcing myself to stay awake.
The stress was tough, but what I didn’t realize at the time was that I was dealing with something greater than everyday worry.
“Everyone has stress, and especially everyone has stress around exam time,” explained Debra Earl, a nurse with the Student Wellness Centre’s Mental Health Team. “But with people who are exposed to a lot of stress, often depression can result.”
Hearing a word like depression used to describe yourself can be shocking and disheartening. Months after that particular breakdown, my inability to focus and sleep continued, and my unhealthy coping mechanisms became a default. After running from my problem for months, I realized that my symptoms were not going to go away on their own and soon after, I was diagnosed with a combination of general anxiety, depression and early signs of obsessive compulsive disorder.
“People will be struggling with a lot of symptoms, with their anxiety, with their depression, trying to manage it on their own, until it affects their academics. Then they realize, this is bigger than me, I can’t do this by myself,” said Earl.
When I was struggling with my health last year, the hardest part about finding help was accepting that I had a problem and asking for help. I was always really “normal” when it came to school, so having troubles with stress was surprising and hard to understand. But even if you don’t have a history of mental illness, during times of high stress, anything is possible.
“People who have never come in before are coming in and its beyond the stage of just dealing with stress, it’s often resulted in an anxiety disorder,” said Earl in reference to a number of students who approach the SWC for help.
Mental illness is not something uncommon among students our age, and it’s not something to be ashamed of either.
In the 2012 Canadian Community Health Survey, 17 per cent of Canadians over the age of 15, approximately 4.9 million individuals, perceived themselves as having a need for mental health care in the past 12 months. It’s not a rare problem, yet for some reason, reaching out for help feels embarrassing and over dramatic.
“It would be better if people came in sooner, but most people don’t come in until a crisis has resulted,” explained Earl when speaking about early diagnosis.
There’s no reason to feel guilty, ashamed, or disappointed for feeling sick. It may not be something you have control over anymore and its ok to seek help for it. If I had dealt with my problem earlier on, I probably would have had a much more positive year and I would have found healthy coping mechanisms earlier on.
Earl encourages students who are having difficulties coping with stress to reconsider their eating and sleeping habits and make time for activities outside of school work.
If your stress is keeping you up at night, interfering with your work, or is making you feel unwell, reach out to a friend, family member, your physician, or one of the many resources on campus. Or even if you find that a friend or relative is acting out of character, initiate discussion, they may just be waiting for someone to approach them.
Running away from your problems is easy at the beginning, but trust me, they’ll catch up to you before you catch up to yourself.
Sophia Topper
The Silhouette
If you feel that life is not worth living, and have felt that way for quite some time, then you may have depression.
If you do poorly on a test, you are dejected. You are not depressed.
If you are driven to distraction every time a volume dial isn’t left on a multiple of five, you may have OCD.
If you like to have all your dirty laundry in your hamper, then you are a tidy person. You do not have OCD.
Our culture is consumed by hyperbole. You aren’t hungry — you’re starving. You hit your snooze button a million times this morning. Your backpack weighs more than an elephant, because your laptop is from the Stone Age. Things are never good enough the way they are. Everything needs to be extreme, to be epic. This inflation is fine for mundane complaints, but when it starts to extend into subjects such as mental health, it becomes problematic.
The language we use to describe ourselves and our feelings has implications that reach far further than some angsty Facebook statuses. Saying that you’re “depressed” because Breaking Bad ended negates the actual depression that I feel because my brain chemistry is messed up.
I’m not just griping because I want to feel special and exclusive. The appropriation of mental illness is troubling because it obscures the actual cries for help. When someone says “I’m really depressed and overwhelmed right now,” they should be met with concern, empathy, suggestions to visit the Wellness Centre, open arms and minds, not “yeah, me too, I only got a C on that paper!”
Generally, if you can fix your mood with a trip to Yogurty’s, you are not depressed. It is incredibly difficult to come forwards and ask for help, so please don’t trivialize it.
The appropriation of mental illness goes beyond depression. Think of all the times you’ve heard people describe themselves as “OCD.” First, no one is OCD—that’s like saying “I am chickenpox.” OCD is a potentially debilitating illness that causes intrusive unpleasant thoughts if certain compulsions are not recognized. Liking exactly two and half sugar cubes in your tea is just picky. Likewise, ADD and ADHD are medical conditions, not trendy excuses for laziness or always checking Facebook. It’s important not to obscure the needs of people battling mental illness just to attempt to make yourself stand out.
It’s even worse when this language contributes to the stigma. Calling the weather “bi-polar” may not seem like a big deal, but it plays into all the negative stereotypes of the disorder. Same with calling some a “Schizo”: it’s obviously rude, but it also attributes negative behaviour to the disorder that doesn’t even fit the diagnosis.
Using clinical definitions does not mean you have a varied vocabulary. It means you are obscuring the seriousness of actual issues. If someone tells you they are depressed, reach out. Take it seriously. Don’t let hyperbole prevent you from helping someone in need.
