Mental health week only works if we let it

College marks the first time a lot of students find themselves eye-to-eye with real issues. Not to discount high school or the type of trauma that can happen growing up, but something about being out on your own in the world brings to light a lot of things you’d only ever seen on TV dramas.

Addictions of all kinds are real. Depression is perhaps more prevalent than you thought it’d be. Every degree of unchecked anxiety winds its way throughout campus, and serious adult problems creep into life in ways you once thought were merely fictitious.

It’s been a year almost to the day since I last addressed mental health issues in this very newspaper, and in that time I’ve come to an even stronger belief that this deserves more of our attention than we’ve been willing to give.

I am wholly convinced that there is no one student on this campus who is not in some way affected by mental health problems, be it their own or that of their friends. Even with Utah State’s Counseling and Psychological Services running an entire week’s worth of events for this very reason, I worry about the lack of understanding that always seems to accompany any talk of one’s emotional well-being.

Seeing a therapist is still taboo. If there’s a particular color of bumper sticker ribbon to raise awareness of depression or eating disorders or suicidal thoughts, I couldn’t tell you what it is. There’s still been no particularly successful effort to elevate this past a peripheral concern, despite the fact that our classmates and friends are stressed, lonely and potentially harming themselves without so much as a warning bell.

CAPS can only do so much for students. There has to be some form of recognition that you do, in fact, have a problem before you can seek outside help to solve it. Nobody likes the idea of putting a label on what can so easily be written off as some form of insecurity — nobody wants to be diagnosed.

This is where our twisted view of emotional problems starts to unravel.

If you’ve got a cancerous tumor, it’s a problem whether you go see your oncologist or not. You can call it something else, rationalize your symptoms as perhaps an entirely different concern and generally pretend it isn’t there, but that doesn’t keep it from poisoning you. You can’t think your way out of a tumor.

Somehow that logic seems not to apply when we consider depression, anxiety, eating disorders or even general unhappiness. We tend to convince ourselves any kind of dissatisfaction with our own lives is a simple matter of attitude adjustment, when in reality wishing away your bad feelings on your own is usually about as helpful as wishing away the flu.

There’s a major disconnect when it comes to our physical health and the well-being of our emotional selves, and it seems to hit hardest in these formative years where we’re all trying to figure out what our futures hold. The idea of a successful career and a fulfilling life is irrationally detached from our inability to recognize when we aren’t taking care of ourselves.

I hope for the sake of the entire Aggie family we find a way to close that distance, because if ever there was a time to learn how to be happy and healthy and successful, it’s now.

— Logan Jones is a junior majoring in journalism. Contact him with feedback at Logantjones@aggiemail.usu.edu or on Twitter @Logantj.