Dealing with a Roommate in Depression

By Jacqueline Rochonchou on January 13, 2012

Everyone hears about the horrifiic tales of a bad roommate. We all enter school dreading that we won’t like the random girl or boy we will be confined to our cublicles with. We could get the one who blasts loud music and stays up all night, the one who for some reason still needs to sleep with a light on, and of course the one who is up early at 6 am banging things around. I was fortunate enough to never have one of these roommates, but what I did have was a depressed one.

Photo by hang_in_there on flickr.com

There’s a ton of stress associated with school. There’s a massive workload mixed in with keeping up with an apartment and being away from your family. It can really take a toll on anyone, and there is an increasing trend in clinically depressed college students. In fact, Penn State offers a certain amount of free therapy sessions a semester to help students deal with the anxiety, stress, and pressure that can arise.

The girl that I am living with, will call her Hayley, has known all of us before living with us. You would a cheery, beautiful apartment with four young and fun girls living in it would be just what she wanted. But she started feeling the pressure of her major and the need to do well to graduate. She started missing her family more, as many do the older they get, and she began retreating in herself. She would sit in her room for longer periods of time, leave the apartment to cry on the phone more, and even began making weekend trips home repeatedly. Her grades began to slip which put her in that vicious cyle we all dread. Each one of us has encouraged her to speak to someone but she has refused. It’s not that she’s a bad roommate, it has come down to the point where we hardly see her or interact with her any longer.

A national college health survey done with the National Mental Health Association has said that over 10% of college students suffer from depression. But what is different about their depression is that usually it’s situational depression according to Dr. Bruce A. Guebard of First Care Family Physicians. This means that college students are usually affected by some sort of change in their enviornment. It can be as simple as your mother always does your laundry, and now you are cooking, cleaning, and doing everything for yourself and it makes you desperate to get back to her-as it was in Hayley’s case. The depression can also be sparked by fear of the future, fear of failure, breakups, a hard class or professor, lonliness, etc. And these are things that college students are facing everyday. Not to mention drugs, sex, or sexual assault which can very well be thrown in the mix for many too.

So look for signs in your roommates-lack of appetitite or excessive eating, moodiness, fatigue, crying, withdrawing from social situations, etc. If a comment is every

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