By Tay Jing Xuan (20S03C)
Photos courtesy of Ms Chua Kah Hwee (counsellor at RGC) and Raffles Photographic Society

When you step into the school compound, you might find that thoughts about grades, competitions and relationships start to plague you.

Let’s take it a step further. Do they already race through your mind at home, in the middle of lunch, or even out with friends? For some, the answer is most likely a yes. School brings with it tremendous amounts of stress to perform well in all aspects of our lives. Who wants to have a ‘U’ blemish their results slips, or to have a record they held broken by someone else? There is no respite from the multitude of stressors hounding us day by day, and some might find it hard to cope.

However, for some, this becomes more sinister. What seems to be a perfectly normal fear grows uncontrollable—insomnia hits out of nowhere when you were sleeping just fine the night before, or a small cry suddenly turns into a breathless, crushing panic. There can be no trigger because this fear has taken root so deeply that it is ever-present, even without you knowing.

As these worries turn into something more sinister, they change one’s behaviour along the way. Soon, the way one treats the stressors in their lives transforms into something else.

But what is this “something else”?

Reading Time: 7 minutesBy Wong Zi Yang (19A01D)
Cover illustration by Alvin Lim Jun Han (19S06B)

I don’t think it comes as a surprise to anyone that we have quite a few students suffering from depression in Singapore. In fact, it’s one of the more common mental illnesses seen in Singaporean youth. What comes as a bit of a surprise to me is how little people actually care about the situation; and by “‘care” I mean take tangible action against it. We may hear the odd rumour here and there: “he’s been missing school a lot lately”, or “someone has been hospitalised”. If an incident does happen, people keep quiet out of confidentiality and respect for those involved. But at the same time, doing so means that there is little to no impetus for uninvolved students, already busy enough as is with the academic rigour of school, to care much about it. The problem is not addressed at its root, and we just don’t talk about it – and so I set out to look deeper into students’ responses to depression in Raffles: Do people care enough about it? What then can we do about it?

Continue reading “Let’s Talk (About Depression)” →