For National Depression Screening Day on Oct. 7, Boston University Student Health Services set up screening sites to help those suffering from depression. According to The Daily Free Press, “SHS screened about 215 people, a huge increase from last year.” This statistic shows that initiatives by government, school and students to overcome the problem of depression are increasing.
However, in the case of international students, due to their distinctive circumstances, it is often harder to overcome depression once it is diagnosed. Thus, in order to provide special care to them, it is first necessary to understand these students and the distinctive type of depression they are undergoing. Interestingly, this depression has some similarities with an economic depression.
First, both economic depression and clinical depression are dormant for a while then burst out all at once. In the case of an economic depression, economic indicators provide warning signals about an economic depression before it becomes evident. However, government and equity market kept ignoring these pre-warnings and all at once faced economic depression like the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008. This is similar to the clinical depression of the international students.
According to SHS, the main reasons BU students suffer from depression are stress and anxiety due to relationship failure, poor grades and homesickness. International students are more exposed to these three causes. They experience stress as they are adjusting to new geographical, cultural and language differences. Students that were considered “excellent” in their home countries become “normal,” which creates unbearable stress. Students from relationship oriented cultures experience severe loneliness in the U.S.’s individualistic culture. Furthermore, they have greater pressure than American students regarding grades as they came to the U.S. solely to study.
However, they seldom find groups who can understand their loneliness, stress and anxiety. As a result, they lose confidence and become lethargic, and keep ignoring the symptoms of depression.
Second, both economic depression and clinical depression can have tragic consequences. During economic depressions, despair from economic loss leads people to commit suicide because debts incurred exceed their capacity to repay. International students also choose suicide to evade their realities. Even though they try to find solutions to deal with their stress on their own, they only find themselves helpless and worthless. When this feeling of worthlessness persists, they sometimes make an extreme decision.
Understanding the last commonality between economic depression and clinical depression is most critical to help international students suffering from depression. Depression can only be healed by “a spirit of a community” &- the sense that you are a part of me.
Life cannot be lived alone but together. In relationship-oriented cultures like that of South Korea, there is no such expression as “none of your business.” If you consider depression suffered by international students in your class only as “their business,” you should remember that your suffering can be only “your business” to someone else.
There are more than 5,000 international students at BU. Can BU become a community to these students? If that is possible, it could be the most powerful solution to guiding them to the screening tables and leading them to a path of hope and recovery. If you have an international friend suffering from depression, why don’t you ask him or her, “how do you say family in your language?” Then, say to your friend, “I will be your family.”
Say Young Lee is a graduate student in the School of Theology.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
