Mental health has become an increasingly prominent topic of discussion on college campuses, especially with the shootings at Virginia Tech last spring and at Northern Illinois University less than a month ago.
Ross Szabo, the director of the youth outreach program for the National Mental Health Awareness Campaign, will speak today about mental health problems in his presentation Mixed Drinks
Mixed Emotions which relates the topics of depression, suicide and substance abuse with his personal experience with bipolar disorder.
The presentation is more about mental health Szabo said. It's something that affects everyone
even if it's just stress.
Szabo has traveled to many schools and has spoken to more than half a million students; he said he has noticed that campus culture tends to feed into mental health problems and the stigma surrounding it.
When students compete with their peers over who is the most stressed, they make it seem like it's more acceptable to be messed up than healthy, he said, adding that it also doesn't help that the stigma around mental health problems makes people embarrassed and unwilling to accept their diagnosis.
You can deny a problem for only so long
Szabo said.
The problem can get worse if people with a mental illness try to relieve their problems through alcohol: Seven out of 10 binge drinkers have a co-occurring mental illness, Szabo said.
We can take away all the alcohol in the world
but you can't take away the reasons why a person (chooses to drink)
he said.
The presentation is a part of the Ohio University athletic department's CHAMPS/Life Skills program. Each year the NCAA allocates funds for universities to provide services to help student athletes cope with college stress, said Terry Koons, the associate director for health promotion. Though the speech is geared more toward student athletes, Szabo said the topic is one that affects all college students.-
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Katherine Bercik
