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Awesome Things About College
Apr. 28th, 2008 08:47 pmY'know what? College is actually a pretty damn awesome place. And formal dinners lately have been pretty damn awesome.
Last week we had an intensely amusing woman whose name I've forgotten, but who was at an earlier stage in her career the only practicing sexologist in Sri Lanka and is now high up in the sexual health unit at Cumbo campus. In hindsight, she was weirdly conservative in places, or at least saying things which fuel conservative tropes about sex.1 But she was there, she was frank, and she was deliberately funny. The waves of giggling across the hall weren't exactly comfortable belly laughs, but, as the Pauls Boys present later remarked upon with astonishment, they were the nervous laughs of two hundred and fifty girls actually engaging with a sex talk. I dunno about you, but I think it's pretty awesome when the post-speaker question time means intelligent questions about orgasms and oxytocin and what have you bouncing back and forth across the formal dining hall.
This week we had Proffessor Ian someone-or-other,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fahye's hero in life and the bigwig behind Beyond Blue, talking about youth mental illness and the problems with making information and assistance available. What was really awesome was standing around in the commmon room afterwards, drinking tea, in a group which fluctuated between five and twenty people, tossing around thoughts and experiences on stress, anxiety, depression and so on.
I realised as I was walking back up here- until tonight, I'd never met anyone who can say I had depression- with the exception of five or six people I knew through school who had depression until they had a spectacular conversion moment.2
I guess a lot of people who have had depression don't go around telling everyone. Might it make a difference if they did? Might it be easier to convince friends to seek help if more happy, vibrant people were out there saying "I got help, it worked!" Might it be easier to seek help oneself? Might it go a long way to counter the 'counselling is for REALLY CRAZY PEOPLE' mentality, and the 'I'm not sure how helpful it really is to keep rehashing things in shrink's offices' mentality that people of my mother's generation are still passing on to their (nearly-grown) kids?
Conclusion: College is a pretty awesome place.
~
1. Masking tape analogy, anyone? Once you've had that one shouted at you by a prancing representative of the True Love Waits Society, you start to become very suspicious of anyone using keywords like that.
2. If it works, far be it from me to decry it. However, in the case of one formerly close friend, all that changed was that she no longer thought she had depression, and as well as demonstrating all the symptoms she had before, she became a sanctimonious so-and-so into the equation, so you'll forgive me for a little skepticism.
Last week we had an intensely amusing woman whose name I've forgotten, but who was at an earlier stage in her career the only practicing sexologist in Sri Lanka and is now high up in the sexual health unit at Cumbo campus. In hindsight, she was weirdly conservative in places, or at least saying things which fuel conservative tropes about sex.1 But she was there, she was frank, and she was deliberately funny. The waves of giggling across the hall weren't exactly comfortable belly laughs, but, as the Pauls Boys present later remarked upon with astonishment, they were the nervous laughs of two hundred and fifty girls actually engaging with a sex talk. I dunno about you, but I think it's pretty awesome when the post-speaker question time means intelligent questions about orgasms and oxytocin and what have you bouncing back and forth across the formal dining hall.
This week we had Proffessor Ian someone-or-other,
fahye's hero in life and the bigwig behind Beyond Blue, talking about youth mental illness and the problems with making information and assistance available. What was really awesome was standing around in the commmon room afterwards, drinking tea, in a group which fluctuated between five and twenty people, tossing around thoughts and experiences on stress, anxiety, depression and so on. I realised as I was walking back up here- until tonight, I'd never met anyone who can say I had depression- with the exception of five or six people I knew through school who had depression until they had a spectacular conversion moment.2
I guess a lot of people who have had depression don't go around telling everyone. Might it make a difference if they did? Might it be easier to convince friends to seek help if more happy, vibrant people were out there saying "I got help, it worked!" Might it be easier to seek help oneself? Might it go a long way to counter the 'counselling is for REALLY CRAZY PEOPLE' mentality, and the 'I'm not sure how helpful it really is to keep rehashing things in shrink's offices' mentality that people of my mother's generation are still passing on to their (nearly-grown) kids?
Conclusion: College is a pretty awesome place.
~
1. Masking tape analogy, anyone? Once you've had that one shouted at you by a prancing representative of the True Love Waits Society, you start to become very suspicious of anyone using keywords like that.
2. If it works, far be it from me to decry it. However, in the case of one formerly close friend, all that changed was that she no longer thought she had depression, and as well as demonstrating all the symptoms she had before, she became a sanctimonious so-and-so into the equation, so you'll forgive me for a little skepticism.