I’m Andrea Levinson. I’m a psychiatrist here at CAMH, and I head the Early Intervention Clinic, which is a clinic that provides assessment and treatment for young people with psychosis and in the context of mood difficulties.
There are more and more students who are identifying themselves as having concern regarding mental illness. I see mental health and mental illness as a continuum on the campus, but certainly more and more students are identifying and presenting issues or even coming into the university with prior difficulties in terms of mental illness and presenting with a lot of acuity in terms of symptoms that they are experiencing and quite a lot of complexity.
The most common problems that students face are related to academic stress, and they are mainly anxiety and mood difficulties, forms of depression or milder forms of mood dysregulation, and then there are also a number of students who start to manifest symptoms of issues related to eating disorders, substance use and abuse and the whole continuum of that regard is a key theme. And then there are students who have illnesses like bipolar disorder, psychotic disorders, it’s the whole gamut.
The main message for students completing high school and entering post-secondary institutions would be to realize that there will be a transition, that things will feel different, that there will be a whole lot of life transitions in terms of sometimes living on one’s own, regulating one’s day, structuring one’s study and work schedule, and I think connectedness and being connected to family whom they may have left – whether it’s chatting, texting, Skyping on an ongoing basis, developing connections in terms of friendships, roommates in residence, knowing that there are people at the most senior level – be it dons in residence – and knowing that there are services at whatever university you’re at where you can sit down and chat with someone.
My main message to families who have a young adult who is starting university is to remain connected – is to develop an expectation of how frequently that connection would be and how it would happen, and if that connection is lost or there’s an interruption, that the families would then need to take note and have someone they could contact and inquire about how their child is doing.
I’m Doctor David Goldbloom, a psychiatrist and senior medical advisor at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. And we’re here today to talk about depression, a common problem that affects one in 10 men and one in five women over the course of their lives.
[depression-related words]
Depression is a condition that is very different than simply feeling sad, low or blue. It’s a recognized clinical disorder with a whole range of signs and symptoms that allow us to make the diagnosis of depression as an illness.
Depression as a clinical disorder is something more sustained and more broad. Yes, there’s an element of having a low mood, but for many people with depression, that low mood is a sense of numbness or a lack of reactivity to the things that normally bring us pleasure. There are classic disturbances in sleep, energy, appetite, concentration, memory, motivation, decision-making, and the ability to experience pleasure that are characteristic of the clinical disorder that is depression.
The first step in the treatment of depression is making sure that that’s in fact the diagnosis. So, in other words, a careful and thorough assessment to determine that depression is indeed the problem at hand. But if the depression diagnosis is confirmed, then fortunately we have a variety of treatments that can be helpful. These include various types of counselling or psychotherapy, as well as medications to relieve the symptoms of depression. But for those who seek help, the commonest first stop is the family doctor’s office. And that’s indeed a good place to start in terms of the necessary first step of a careful assessment to determine whether depression indeed is the problem.
If you’re struggling with depression or you think that you might be, don’t suffer in silence: Go see your family doctor. And if you want information about resources available in your community, call Connexontario; it’s a government service that’s available 24/7.