Students gathered Monday evening to listen and talk to Doris Larovici, a psychiatrist at Duke University Counseling and Psychological Services, discuss mental illness and medication on college campuses in an event sponsored by the NC State chapter of the National Alliance of Mental Illness.
Emotional difficulties affect everyone, and there is no category of people who do or do not have them, Larovici said.
“It’s just part of being human,” Larovici said.
The event was informal, with students sitting in a circle around Larovici and asking questions throughout the event.
The number of students seeking help at counseling centers have gone up in the last 20 years, according to Larovici.
Avi Aggarwal, a junior studying chemical engineering and president of State’s NAMI chapter, asked Larovici what trends and changes she would like to see in future research and provider practices for college-aged students.
Larovici said she would like to see researchers pay more attention to learning the appropriate length of treatment for college-aged patients and what to do if medications are discontinued.
Much of the discussion centered on the question of whether or not mental illness treatment has reached a point where it is easier to prescribe medication than address problems.
Larovici said, today, some people will opt for new treatments and medications instead of older methods of treating mental illness because they are under the impression that newer treatments are better, even if the older treatments are more effective.
“People tend to think that the newest drugs are the best, while some old drugs are actually better and cheaper,” Larovici said.
When she worked in a hospital center, Larovici said she often encountered people who wouldn’t want to try free samples of drugs, which are always the newest drugs, because they had the mentality that if something is free, it won’t really work.
According to Larovici, the same concept can be applied to how people view old drugs.
“People think old drugs may not be as good anymore because they are cheap,” Larovici said.
Depression and effectiveness of antidepressants was another topic of discussion among Larovici and students.
Larovici said after antidepressants started coming with warnings about suicidal thoughts, suicide rates may have increased among adolescents.
“Now there is evidence since that warning adolescents had resulted in fewer prescriptions written and the actual rate of suicide attempts has gone up,” Larovici said. “There are clear differences between adult and adolescent brains, and treating depression in teenagers is different than treating it in older people.”
Other students asked personal questions in regards to what they were going through, such as stopping or continuing a certain medication or talked about experiencing family members going through treatments.
Duke does not have a NAMI chapter. Larovici attributed this fact to the Duke campus’ culture.
“Part of Duke’s campus culture has been emphasis on effortless perfection, which is the idea that everyone is smart and beautiful and doesn’t work hard and does well, which is not true for anyone,” Larovici said. “There is a fear of admitting vulnerability which makes it hard to talk about certain things, although that has gotten better in the last five to six years.”
Hekmat Izzat, a junior studying economics, said he thought Larovici gave a great presentation.
“I learned a lot about mental health in the university setting, and how therapy and medication have developed over the years,” Izzat said.
Aggarwal said she liked how Larovici pointed out that, in reality, all people go through some sort of mental illness at some point in their lives.
“I liked that she said that everyone expects to be physically ill at some point, but they regard the mentally ill as a separate category of people and they don’t expect to be mentally ill,” Aggarwal said.
