It seems when most people hear “mental health,” they equate the term with mental illness.

This sentiment puts an unfair stigma on pursuing mental health care, which is counterproductive, to say the least.

Mental health is just as important as physical health and should be treated as such.

Rachel Walker, Outreach Coordinator at WSU’s Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS), offered her views on how mental health should be handled.

“Similar to physical health, our minds and our brains are a dynamic thing,” Walker said. “I think that if we can take a proactive stance on mental health instead of a reactive stance, college students especially can work on skills from a young age.”

Walker emphasized that these skills can help integrate new students into college life and the stresses associated with being in a new academic environment.

“I think it’s a life-long thing and I think it can change as we move through different stages of development,” Walker said. “(Mental health is) a dynamic process.”

Mental health should be taken seriously and monitored from an early age to ensure proper development of the mind as well as emotional growth.

When someone struggles with mental health, they become vulnerable and sensitive.

This can be partly attributed to the state of mental well-being, but can also result from the stigma associated with seeking help and treatment options.

“There is still that stigma in society that mental health and mental illness equals bad,” she said. “But mental health can be a positive thing.”

Your mental health affects many different aspects of your life, even if you don’t notice.

It affects your mood, which in turn changes how you interact with people around you.

Being stressed out or tired can make performing in classes more difficult as well.

“A lot of college students don’t seek counseling because they think that their problem isn’t big enough or they are going to be a burden,” Walker said. “You don’t have to wait for it to become a major problem, where you might not have gotten out of bed in the last 20 days … I think mental health should be on people’s minds all the time.”

College is a time of personal growth and change, and a lot of that growth happens in the mind – so it only makes sense to take care of your brain and help it mature into a healthy and well-functioning mind.

“I think that, developmentally, (this) is the time in life where students are trying to figure out who they are,” Walker said. “If that differs from their parents or what they’ve learned growing up, they have to figure out the direction they want to take.”

As we mature and become fully-functioning adults, many times we feel like we aren’t who we thought we were or who we were supposed to grow up to be.

This is normal – we aren’t robots and we grow from our own personal life experiences.

For this reason, taking care of your mental health is important.

Changes in our worldview can be very stressful, especially when it stems from life experiences that impact us on a personal level.

CAPS hosts walk-in hours Monday through Friday from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., with an exception of Wednesday, which instead runs from 1 – 3:30 p.m. The number for CAPS’ 24-hour crisis line in Pullman is (509)334-1133.

Don’t keep putting it off – take care of your mental health now before it gets out of control.

Editor’s note: This column is part of a head-to-head series. Read the other side here. 

Alexander Davis is a freshman neuroscience major from Kennewick. He can be contacted at 335-2290 or by [email protected]. The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of the staff of The Daily Evergreen or those of The Office of Student Media.