College students are prone to stress and unhappiness due to social, financial, and educational factors, especially around exam time.
The Canadian Organization of University and College Health released a study last year that found 9.5 per cent of college students have admitted to feeling so hopeless they have considered taking their own life in the past year.
Students in post secondary are faced with overwhelming responsibilities including course loads, finances, relationships, and independence. The change of environment, social circles, and identity can cause a lot of stress, and how students can adapt to the changes and manage stress levels vary greatly from person to person.
According to the Canadian Psychological Association, depression will affect more than 10 per cent of Canadians at some point in their lives.
The best way to change these statistics and create happier students is to implement programs that teach techniques on where to find happiness in everyday life and skills on how to enhance it.
Durham College currently offers forensic, developmental, abnormal, and introductory psychology classes.
Psychology can offer understanding and treatment of mental disorders. It provides tools to measure severity of a disease and treat it accordingly, and it works to make miserable people less miserable.
However, with this psychological perspective, psychologists are always searching for what is wrong in someone.
What disease do you have? Why are you sad? How can you be categorized? How are you the victim of your own life?
Many of these classes are necessary for certain fields of work, and I’m not saying they should be replaced. However, if positive psychology is studied at a relatively young age, it may change the entire path of a person’s life.
The study of positive psychology abandons the traditional methods of treating the disease, rather, positive psychology works to intervene and avoid any preventable mental disorders from happening in the first place.
Positive psychology nurtures an individual’s talents and teaches people how to tailor their life around their personal strengths. It believes that each person has a unique set of strengths such as loyalty, gratitude, future mindedness, social intelligence, humour, and leadership.
Positive psychology doesn’t only benefit individuals, but the school community as a whole. Developing individual strengths helps promote personal joy, may create a feeling of purpose, and will increase satisfaction among students and their programs.
Positive psychology helps teach students how to integrate positive mindset changes into day-to-day activities, skills that they can use for the rest of their lives.
Students learn skills such as mindfulness, which helps people to be aware of the environment around them and what is happening to them. Practicing being self-aware allows students to be in control of their perspective, thus altering how an experience affects them. Mindfulness is seeing an experience as a learning opportunity whether the experience is good or bad, which will affect the overall happiness of a person in any of life’s situations.
By starting the adult life with knowledge on how to obtain, maintain, and amplify happiness, there may be a decline in the number of people who develop mental health disorders in the future.
