If you’re a college student and you’re depressed, chances are you have a student counseling center that’s available to you, at no charge.

Sounds good, right? In an ideal world, the student counseling center would properly assess, diagnose and even treat students with mental health concerns — such as depression, anxiety, ADHD, and more.

But we don’t live in an ideal world and student counseling centers don’t make a university any money. So they aren’t necessarily well-funded, overflowing with well-paid staff or have access to all the resources they need.

That’s why Emily Merlino’s column about her experience at the University of Massachusetts (UMass), supposedly one of the better universities in the country, was a bit disheartening to read. In it, she details how she was experiencing depressive feelings and sought out help from a professional at the UMass Mental Health Services clinic.

Throughout the years, I’ve lost many people to depression, and I’ve had many people in my life who have struggled and survived. Although many were in their 20s, some were as young as 16 years old. The biggest problem is that depression isn’t visible like the chickenpox. It’s easy to hide and can show up out of the blue. One day everything could be wonderful and perfect and the next day could be a dark one.

Luckily, these feelings of sadness, anxiety, and depression are not as rare as they may seem; people like you and me may conceal them every day and no one would ever know it. Instead we wait until we’re home alone or with our loved ones to unleash the dragon. Because depression is so widespread, it’s important to remember that we are never alone. Someone always has it worse. We should be grateful for what we do have, and bad things will soon subside. Similar to the change of seasons, depression will bloom and wilt, but we can try to conquer it for good.

I have a lot of experience with depression — through family, friends, and even myself as a teenager. The biggest issue we face as young adults is that we don’t want to admit when we feel depressed, so we start to shut people out and ignore these powerful feelings that could end up destroying us.

I started psychotherapy for the wrong reasons.

A few people had suggested throughout the past couple years that I do it, and I thought I’d go to one session to say I’d done it and be done with it. Well, I went to that one session and told the counselor I needed help with stress. She talked to me about stress, but in ending the session, rather than asking “Do you want to come back?” asked “When do you want to come back?”

I have difficulty saying no to anyone, so I agreed to a time. The next session went nearly identical to the first, but during the third session she redirected the goal of our sessions toward me talking more. She had me take some tests (MMPI-2 and MCMI) and I wrote out a list of my goals for her.

She never directly told me, but eventually I picked up that she thinks I have social anxiety disorder. She started having me write down situations in which I felt anxious and what I was thinking and feeling at those times, but I didn’t really understand the point of it. I started realizing just how much anxiety had controlled my life, but I didn’t feel like doing this was helping me.

What this work did do, however, was make me really want to be able to do the things I was so terrified of doing.

I live in a college town.

In fact, I live in the college town in which I used to attend college.

I moved back here a few months ago and I pass my (er, the college’s) library daily. It brings back plenty of academic memories — and, surprisingly, they’re not the stressful ones. In the six years that have passed since my graduation, the memories of stress and panic and due dates and overwhelming projects has faded.

But the positive stuff remains: the nights spent in a library study nook with my Intro to Communication textbook and a highlighter. (I loved that class.)

The satisfaction of applying a concept I learned in my 9 a.m. Intro to Logic class to my 2 p.m. Composition class. (I could point out all the major logical fallacies in our assigned reading.)

The scent of the pages of a brand-new textbook. (Am I the only one who thinks that new books sort of smell like cucumbers on the inside?)

I hit the peak of wistful sentimentality last week and found a way to re-create a portion of the academic college experience (without the stress!): watching actual college lectures on Academic Earth.

If I Could Go Back is a series of articles that center around the college experience. Hindsight is 20/20, and sometimes the best advice we could ever give stems from experiences in our past that make us cringe just the tiniest bit.

Someone once told me that every romantic relationship in our lives will fail until one doesn’t. It sounds harsh, and perhaps a little narrow-minded (can we really succeed or fail in love?), but there is truth to it. Most of us, especially those of us under 25, will enter into relationships that will someday end.

There’s something about going through the end of a relationship in college that tends to make everything more intense. Maybe it’s the added stress of keeping up with schoolwork when all you want to do is curl up into a ball or go for a long walk that lasts all day. Maybe it’s the task of telling tons of people who used to know you as “together” that you’re no longer together. Or maybe it’s just because at such a young age, we haven’t had much practice in the art of dealing with a broken heart. Whatever the case, the end of young love (or even young infatuation) is not easy. In fact, it can be downright hellish.

But there are ways to survive it.

And then, grow from it.

[If I Could Go Back is a series of articles that center around the college experience. Hindsight is 20/20, and sometimes the best advice we could ever give stems from experiences in our past that make us cringe just the tiniest bit.]

I didn’t gain the Freshman 15 — I gained the College 15 — an increase in pounds over the course of 4 pretty stressful, not particularly healthy years. And while some people might not think 15 pounds is a big deal, when you’re 5 feet 2 inches, yeah — it’s noticeable.

I gained this weight without being a big partier (I have this thing against crowded rooms that smell like barf) and still going to the gym in a fairly regular way. So what the heck happened? A little something called: stress-induced emotional eating.

[If I Could Go Back is a series of articles that center around the college experience. Hindsight is 20/20, and sometimes the best advice we could ever give stems from experiences in our past that make us cringe just the tiniest bit.]

“If I could do it all over again, I’d major in Education.”

“Oh, me too. Either that or Business.”

“I should have majored in Economics. At least then I’d have a real job.”

These are not the words of slackers or lazy, “Generation Me” complainers. Nor is this a made up conversation invented by a conglomerate of strict parents hoping their children will study something safe in college. This dialogue was actually spoken, by real twenty-somethings, all of whom worked hard for good grades and big fellowships, sometime last week.

During a short vacation back to my hometown, I met up with a bunch of old friends. As we all got caught up with each other’s lives, it became shriekingly apparent that there was a trend among the entire group: we all wished we had been more practical in college.