While college can be stressful and everyone will at some moment feel “down and discouraged,” when a friend or family member’s activity and outlook on life stays “down” for weeks and begins to affect your relationship, they might be suffering from depression. Know that you can help.
What is helpful
What is not helpful
Helping Someone with an Eating Disorder
A recent Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) survey found that 76% of 939 students surveyed reported some dissatisfaction with their weight. U-M students reported that eating disorders were the second most common problem among students who took the survey.
Nationally, approximately 10 million women and 1 million men are struggling with symptoms of an eating disorder.
Academic stress and struggles could include usual or upsetting changes in one’s academic life. Maybe you or a friend are having trouble getting motivated to go to class, completing assignments, or remembering what was read while still reading. Maybe you notice that you or a friend are having more difficulty writing papers, or studying for a particular topic than usual. These are all examples of academic struggles that place a lot of stress on all aspects of student life.
Knowing what makes a healthy relationship, listening intently, and providing the following advice is a great start in helping someone who may be having trouble with a relationship they are in.
Admittedly, relationships differ greatly between different cultures. If the following advice does not seem applicable, a counselor can help you or a friend work through relationship situations that may be more difficult or complicated as a result of cultural expectations.
What makes a healthy relationship?
Self-esteem is initially acquired through two main sources: how others treated us, and what others told us about ourselves.
As adults, our self-esteem is largely based on two sources of self: our perceived self — who we really think we are, and our ideal self — who we really think we ought to be.
Most of us experience feelings of anxiety in our lives. It can often occur right before coming back to school or leaving home for the first time, or before an important event, job interview, exam, or a new social situation, or first date. Not only is anxiety a common human emotion, but some amount of anxiety can be helpful. Maybe when faced with a looming deadline for a paper for a class, or an important event, anxiety might motivate you to better prepare for an exam, complete an assignment on time, or give a great presentation to your class.
Often, people are unaware of how common suicidal thoughts are. For this reason, you may find the following University of Michigan-Ann Arbor Suicide Statistics quite surprising:
Confidentiality is a professionally and legally complex issue, not subject to a thorough explanation in a few sentences. Usually, information that a student shares with her/his counselor/therapist in the course of a counseling session will be treated as confidential material. Treating information confidentially means not releasing it to anyone outside the agency without the student's permission.
Whether you are on campus, off campus, in Ann Arbor, or not, there are ways to stay in touch with CAPS and all the things we continue to do over the summer. Here are a few ideas:
According to the NCAA, college students (including student athletes) are susceptible to heavy and frequent alcohol use when arriving to campus due to a believed cultural myth that campus life is about alcohol abuse and drug use. In comparison with non student athletes, student athletes report higher rates of binge drinking. Binge drinking is defined as four or more drinks for women and five or more for men. According to the NCAA, one in five male student athletes who use alcohol report consuming 10 or more alcoholic beverages in a social outing.