Blog #2: Scouting the Territory

My focus for the final research paper will be focused on mental health issues in college. Since mental health is such a large subject, I was thinking about focusing on things such as being a first-generation student and possible mental health effects, different resources (or the lack of) for mental health, and the increase of mental health issues such as anxiety, depression, and how stress can affect you. 

The first key term I looked up was “mental health in college.” When I was going through the search results, there was a lot of websites that focused on the most pressing mental health issues that college students face, how to recognize it, and how we can address the issue. I also looked up the “rise of depression in college students.” This search leads to different websites about how people can get help and also different websites saying how depression is a rising epidemic. Lastly, I searched “mental health for first-generation students.” This yielded the most interesting results. Personally, I did not think that this topic would be researched extensively but I found several research papers on the topic. The research I looked at stated that first-generation students show more signs of stress and anxiety compared to their peers. 

One book that seems important is called, College of the Overwhelmed: The Campus Mental Health Crisis and What to Do About It by Richard Kadison and Theresa Foy DiGeronimo. Although the book is from 2005, it seems like it may have some insightful information and it also gives stories of students who were going through high levels of stress and how they overcame it. I also found a research paper that is titled “The role of social support on acculturation stress and allostatic load among first- and second-generation immigrant college students” by Lisa Garsman. The researchers in this paper took a sample of first and second-generation immigrant students and looked at how different factors such as allostatic load and lack of social support affect their stress levels. 

While doing research, I found a lot of topics that intrigued me. I still want to focus on the points I mentioned before, but possibly focus more on the effect first-generation students face when it comes to mental health issues. But, I also still want to focus on different resources (or the lack of) for mental health, and the increase of mental health issues such as anxiety, depression, and how stress can affect you. 

One of the resources I found was the following: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4691k02z. This research paper goes in-depth on the issue of first-generation students and the way their mental health and academic performance is being affected. I did not think there would be much about this, but there is a lot of good resources, including this one, that I hope to use when writing my paper. Another resource I found helpful was: https://www.statnews.com/2017/02/06/mental-health-college-students/. The article discusses how colleges are unable to keep up with the demand for mental health services. It gives different statistics from different schools and potential wait times students might have to face to see someone. I would like to look into why they are unable to keep up with the demand and how the issue can be fixed. I would also like to look at how this affects students here at our own university. For this, I would like to look at something said in the following article: https://www.dailytargum.com/article/2019/09/rutgers-will-close-all-student-pharmacies-on-campus-later-this-fall. In this article, it is said that since the school pharmacy has closed, Rutgers wants to invest more in services such as CAPS which is the on-campus counseling center. I want to look into if this really happened and the mental health resources on campus.