Essay Sample: Mental Health Issues in College Students. Community Counseling.

Question one - Mental Health Issues in College Students

For most of the students, college is the time of their liberation; college is where they have new opportunities for studying, playing and working. This is the time where they can learn new things, make new mistakes and grow up towards gaining independence. As years go by colleges present more options for students. This is the time of freedom and autonomy they experience love, laughter make new friends but they also go through some experiences that might be new, strange and mentally challenging and too overwhelming for them. Even though early adulthood is frequently described by fast rational and social maturity, the incredible crisis of psychological problems and the emotional turmoil that college students might be exposed to and going through makes this a risky period of their lives. Below are the issues that may need crisis intervention for college or university students.

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College student population is known to have prevalent mental health issues that some may not feel so willing to share with their parents or friends. For instance, according to the Center for Disease Control, female students experience sexual assault or threatened sexual assault during their time at the college or university and about half of college students had a psychiatric condition in 2016. According to a survey report on psychological health by the National Alliance on Mental Illness, 73% of students go through some form of mental health crisis in their time at the college. The reason to this is that most of these students feel overwhelmed by all the things they had to do in their past years and 45 percent out of the 80 percent feel like they have no hope for the future. As a result of their hopeless situations, they indulge in substance abuse, suffer from anxiety disorders, they sink into depression and start having eating disorders (Nugent & Jones, 2009). Once all these starts happening, lower GPA is seen in students and the risk of college dropout increases.

Considering the elevated rates of college students trying to commit suicide, some reports point out that the level of depression has been rising progressively in the past few years. Approximately 46.7 percent of Americans aged between 18 years and 24 years attend college part time and full time. And out of these almost a third of them have reported to having experienced so much depression during their time at school hat they found it hard to function. Psychiatric disorders, especially those related with alcohol abuse are the most common in college populations with only 25 percent of the affected seeking treatment (Nugent & Jones, 2009). This is one of the reasons that emphasize the importance of helping these students o prevent and overcome mental problems.

These issues are more prevalent in students that stay away from home because that could act as their only safe place for sharing what they go through. They therefore might feel alone and may need help from the institution counseling centers and health services. Demand for counseling has ever since grown to approximately five times faster than the average enrollment of students in college. Bearing in mind the constant psychological and wide-ranging health costs of the mental issues these students go through, implementing effectual interventions to lessen and/or prevent the onset of mental problems in university and college students should be given a priority in regard to public health goals.

Question two - Community Counseling

Mental counseling encompassing community counseling is one of the most challenging professions that require experts to employ different theoretical approaches in finding ways to help their patients. This entails fully comprehending human development principles, psychology principles, and theories of change and mental health of humans. It also entails establishing effective and helpful relationships with people that come from different cultures. The process of community counseling consist of five stages: building relationship, evaluation, setting goals, involvement and action and assessment of results and termination (Nugent & Jones, 2009).

Given the current landscape of mental health and managed care, it is not only economical but practical and prudent that community counselors employ a comprehensive approach in helping their patients manage and determine their personal challenges. The expansion of the role of a traditional counselor by incorporating preventive strategies and home treatments in concurrence with traditional interventions provides additional resources to the community counselor in service of their patients.

Community counseling utilizes theoretical and social information to make early interventions on the social problems that are believed to have direct impacts on the mental health of people. Prevention is an essential aspect in community counseling model and it therefore needs to be a part of the organizational structure of community mental health centers. Community counselors aware of the drug related problem present in our society can use proactive prevention strategies to supplement existing counteractive therapeutic approaches (Institute of Medicine (U.S.), 2010). Collaborative drug education, a counseling program and a skills training program can be designed and implemented by the community health counselors for their clients.

The ongoing technological advances in technology indicate that more people will even have access to the internet extensively for social purposes and work purposes. it only takes minutes for one to communicate with another person or carry out research online, something that could have been time consuming in another era. Use of the internet has become so popular that people have become addicted to it. In some ways it is positive but the negative side can be destructive to one's mental and physical health. Pornography and cybersex, online gambling, cyber relationships, spending and gamin addictions are just some of the addictions associated with internet use. Normally they come with mental issues caused by the economic strain, depression, fear of rejection and loss of social skills (Institute of Medicine (U.S.), 2010). People spending too much time on the internet they have very little time for human physical interactions. Community counseling now has incorporated ways in which people can receive counseling on using the internet, ways through which they can only utilize it positively and less frequently.

References

Institute of Medicine (U.S.). (2010). Provision of mental health counseling services under TRICARE. Washington, D.C: National Academies Press.

Nugent, F. A. (2009). Introduction to the profession of counseling. Prentice Hall.