HEALTH PLUS:Please Talk is an initiative in colleges to get students to open up to each other about their problems writes MARIE MURRAY
STUDENTS are talking to each other. All over Ireland they are talking to each other. They are talking to each other about what matters to them.
They are encouraging each other to talk: to talk about life, about love, about happiness, about worries, about hopes, about feelings and fears and the wager of life itself.
They are encouraging each other to talk about their deepest concerns: fears for the future, fears in this recession that the degrees that they are working so hard to achieve may not bring employment. Fears that the world has been spoilt for them and that their future has been compromised by those who should have protected it.
They are talking to each other about stress, about the pressures of study, the tyranny of assignments, the anxiety of assessment and the tension of exams: their fear of failure, of not achieving what they expect of themselves or what other people expect them to accomplish.
They are talking to each other about depression, about the physical pain, the psychological anguish, the loss of self-esteem, of capacity to study, to concentrate, to focus, to even get out of bed for lectures and the self-loathing, sense of worthlessness and anxiety that depression contains.
Students are talking to each other about anger, about when they cannot contain their rage, their disappointment, their emotions, their anxieties and themselves. They are talking to each other if they encounter problems of addiction to alcohol, to gambling, to pornography, to substances that alter their emotions, behaviour and moods.
Students talk to each other about bereavement and loss, if life goes wrong, if a parent, a family member or a friend dies. They talk to each other about helplessness, hopelessness and about those moments when they think that it would be better for them and for others if they were to quit this life. They are talking about the tragedy of suicide. In so doing they are caring for, protecting, minding and guarding each other. They are trying to ensure that those who might consider suicide as an option to life receive the help they need to revalue themselves, recognise their worth, their importance to other people, their unique contribution to life and the disaster that is self-inflicted death.
Young people have always distinguished themselves by their idealism, energy, enthusiasm and altruism and their extraordinary generosity when called upon to help each other or anyone else visibly in need. Walk through any university or IT campus any day and you will find students engaged in something on behalf of others: debating, protesting, collecting, gathering and campaigning for those who are in need. They abhor corruption and injustice, seek it out, call it by name and challenge it.
They will admit of no inequality, no disparity of privilege, no discrimination, no class advantage and no self-righteousness. They are open to all perspectives, all discourses and all lifestyle choices. They are united as a generation. They respond to each other if they receive a signal of need. They know the danger of isolation, of loneliness, of homesickness, of social anxiety, of feeling unable to keep up academically, or to participate socially, of relationship breakdown and of feeling unloved. They know the healing potential of talk.
And two years ago, invoking that healing potential of speaking in the service of keeping each other safe, students in University College Dublin began a campaign, designed by students for students called Please Talk to help each other understand that talking is the antidote to despair, that “speaking is a sign of strength not of weakness” and that any student experiencing any distress should talk about it.
With the energy of their age and stage, the student solidarity of comrades in adversity, their connectivity to each other in the colleges all over Ireland and in their wish to bring the solace of speaking to every student everywhere the Please Talk campaign was shared and now has a home in 19 colleges nationwide. Its website, pleasetalk.ie provides information and details of the various support services that are available to students in each individual college.
Tomorrow, all over Ireland, students will celebrate Please Talk and the arrival of the Please Talk campaign to eight new campuses across Ireland, marking the event in classic student exuberant style by a series of on-campus events. Tomorrow is a celebration of talk and of those students who first spoke out about the strength of speaking.
mmurray@irishtimes.com
Clinical psychologist and author Marie Murray is Director of the Student Counselling Services in UCD