Amanda Lutz, 32
Winona State University
I am divorced, and I live with my parents. I moved home to Minnesota from Texas and decided to continue pursuing my bachelor’s in psychology that I had abandoned after having started school in the fall of 2005. I have been attending classes part time while working full time to keep my health insurance since the summer of 2016.
I am on track to graduate next fall. All the while, I have been fighting with chronic pain from a horseback-riding accident and managing depression. Some days I have purpose and a drive to succeed, and other days I just want to give up. If you really want something in this life, you have to find that resilience to pursue it and just keep going.
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Kyrah Altman, 22
George Washington University
As a result of growing up in a broken and traumatic home, I began experiencing severe anxiety and depression in middle school. While it followed me throughout high school and college, I channeled my struggle with mental illness into the founding of a social enterprise, LEAD (Let’s Empower, Advocate and Do), that provides mental health training and curriculum to schools, camps and youth-serving organizations across the country.
I am a senior undergraduate student and was recently named the third-best student entrepreneur in the country in the Entrepreneurs’ Organization Global Student Entrepreneurship Awards.
Anna Shutley, 19
Wake Forest University
I have struggled with clinical depression and anxiety since my sophomore year of high school. I am a sophomore in college, and I am very passionate about mental health and working to improve it.
I read a lot of self-help books in high school, but most were written by a 50-year-old psychologist who knows what they’re talking about in a clinical sense, but not how it actually feels to be 16 and struggling with suicidal thoughts and panic attacks. Because of this, I decided to write a short book with practical advice for improving your outlook on the world and how to incorporate caring for your mental health into your routine through mindfulness, exercise, limited phone time and leaving room for what brings you joy in life.
I have conducted a workshop at my high school on improving mental health and also do my best to bring that conversation to Wake Forest.
My main philosophy is about learning how to make Tuesday your favorite day of the week, because if you’re always waiting for the weekend or Christmas or your graduation, you are deciding that your happiness is circumstantial, and that therefore you don’t control it, your environment does. However, if you decide that amid the boring, mundane, stressful and sometimes heartbreaking realities of life, that you are going to focus on what is good and build your life around that instead, you are taking back the control that you deserve over your own happiness.
Rachael Cohen Hamilton, 22
University of Colorado Denver
I am in my second semester of graduate school, studying for my master’s in public administration, with a focus in gender-based violence. Within my first weeks of being here I witnessed a homeless woman being raped outside my apartment and obviously called 911.
This in many ways was triggering to me, and I went into my first semester of grad school suffering from pretty severe post-traumatic stress disorder, from both this and a previous incident. This is all happening as the Kavanaugh hearings are happening, and I am taking my first gender-based violence class of my program. As I was taking the bus to and from work every day, I was entirely dissociative.
I likely could not tell you what happened my entire first month of grad school, that’s how detached I was from reality at that time. Luckily, I took the day off for Rosh Hashana and went to the market, and I was able to snap back into reality in a lot of ways. That day I made an appointment with my campus’ sexual assault resource center. It was able to get me extensions on assignments, set me up with a therapist and wrote a letter of support for my department allowing me to drop the gender-based violence class and receive a full refund.
I also saw a psychiatrist and was prescribed beta blockers, which have helped bring down my heightened sense of danger wherever I go. This semester, having had time to help heal, I’ve been able to restart my concentration in gender-based violence, which is more important to me now than ever, and I was still able to complete my other two graduate courses last semester and remain a full-time student.
It was so important for me to write you, to emphasize the importance of institutional support. I still struggle sometimes, but I think that without them helping me, I likely would have had no choice but to drop out and move back home.
Fiona P. Pham, 21
Johns Hopkins University
I always knew that coming to study at another university in a foreign country is tough. You sleep and breathe in English, you learn to embrace flip-flops in the classroom. You adapt. And that was part of my plan.
I embrace new opportunities, learn as much as I can, make mistakes, make friends, have first drinks, pull all-nighters. But depression was never part of my plan. I didn’t even know it had a name until everything felt empty.
So, here I was, FaceTiming my mother without the video because I could not let her see my face. My voice sounds fine, telling her I was fine, schoolwork is challenging but manageable — I am applying to summer internships, competition is rough, but it’s fine. And everything was fine. Except me.
The first time I had a counseling session was weird. It felt weird that I was living my dream, studying in the United States, having supportive family and friends, and yet I was sitting in that chair. I learned that sometimes there was no definite reason for the way I felt. But at least, when I acknowledged that I was not mentally healthy, it was the beginning of my healing process.
Every day I try to make healthier choices and balance all aspects of my life. I go to counseling. I practice mindfulness. I talk to my support network. The chemicals in my brain sometimes act up, but I know I just need to be extra patient that day.
If there is a mental health group on your campus that could provide support, definitely check it out. Every single time you feel that you are trapped in your head, remember that every little step to make yourself feel better is a step, as long as you don’t stop.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.