#3 Ten Facts on Mental Health

1. Toronto saw a 200 per cent increase in demand from students in crisis situations: “homeless, suicidal, really sick,"
2. Fully a quarter of university-age Canadians will experience a mental health problem, most often stress, anxiety or depression.
3. About 51 per cent reported that, within the past 12 months, they’d “felt things were hopeless.”
4. A shocking seven per cent admitted they’d “seriously considered suicide,” and about one per cent had attempted it.
5. In the 14 months that followed, five more Queen’s students (all male) died suddenly, three by suicide.
6.  Queens university has grappled with the label of “suicide school,”
7.  People in their late teens and early twenties are at the highest risk for mental illness; in these years, first episodes of psychiatric disorders like major depression are most likely to appear.
8.  Young adults are somehow less equipped to cope.
9. In a 2011 study of eight U.S. universities, Whitlock, who is director of the Cornell Research Program on Self-Injurious Behaviors, found that 15 per cent of students had cut, burned or otherwise injured themselves.
10. Amid this bustle, construction workers at Cornell University began installing steel mesh nets under seven bridges around campus.