Hello again, bear with me as I give context to the main point of this post.
As I’m sure many readers are, I am a college kid approaching finals. With the rigor of classes in college only increasing across generations, it is believed that this increase can partially account for the rising mental illness among college students.
Every college kid can understand that the 1-2 weeks prior to finals are almost as bad as finals especially in science majors. Half of my credit hours are constituted of labs and therefore piles of lab reports and practicals make up my last week of classes. I have felt more at peace and relaxed right now, days before finals, than I have all semester.
This semester was incredibly rough mentally and physically on my body. I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease about 4 months ago and because of my complicated medical history the doctors are proceeded with significant caution in terms of treatment options which I can understand, however the consequences of that are that I still have many bad days of nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain while the doctors search for a medication that they are comfortable won’t cause any harm with my other medical issues.
With Crohn’s constantly reminding me of my lack of normalcy and a major that requires every ounce of attention I have, my grades have suffered some this semester. I withdrew from a physics course 3-4 months into the class, after I had attempted hours upon hours to learn the material, I made the choice that to get a goof grade in the class and learn the material for the MCAT. However, by the time I withdrew from physics, I had spent so many hours on physics that I was also behind on Organic Chemistry. At this point in my life I was feeling very overwhelmed with everything on my plate with working a job and still riding horses competitively (neither of those were going well either). I felt like I was doing mediocre to poor in every aspect of my life.
All of these things factored into my declining mental health. With everything I have on my plate I will admit that I am not the best at taking care of myself in terms of food, exercise, sleep, and taking/filling medications. For a period of a week, maybe even two, I didn’t refill my Zoloft which is my anxiety/depression medication. Within the span of the week or two I didn’t have my medication my mental health declined rapidly. I didn’t want to get up or move and I cried every day. I had no idea how much my medication does for me until that one or two week span. I was a mess and then once I finally got responsible and filled the medication, I started to think about the people in my last post that couldn’t attain this medication in the first place.
I believe I am classified as having moderate social anxiety and depression. Therefore, there are people out there with it much worse than I have it. If this is how I feel without medication for a week, I can’t imagine what it’s like having a more severe version of these without any medication. I feel so blessed and so privileged to be able to have it. But that’s pretty messed up that the medication I take to make me able to function and feel joy and happiness is not accessible for all people. Especially when statistically, people with low incomes are often the ones with the highest rates of untreated mental illness (unsurprisingly).
I can only imagine the struggles that these people face every day doing daily activities. No wonder these people can’t hold down jobs, or even get hired in the first place. These medications bring out the personality in people that had theirs suppressed by their disease and that should be a right and not a privilege.
Mental Illness is Not A Profit 