my bedroom. Anna, my older sis- ter, is 18. She drives me to school and seems unashamed of the white hospital bracelet that clings to one of her sticky, taped up wrists. No one will tell me what is going on but I find out anyway because the blood is all over the place. She cut too hard this time. When I approach the woman working at the CAPS front desk and tell her I am there to interview Dr. Lindsey Mortenson, she tells me to have a seat. I imagine she is about to schedule me an appointment with a therapist. You’re here as a reporter, I keep repeating to myself, but I’m not convincing anybody. Heat begins to seep through my skin and crawl into my soul like a worm eats its way through an apple. It’s so hot that I worry my sweat will flood the room, lifting all the chairs off the rug and mak- ing them float down the hallway like ghosts. The room is completely windowless, and every surface is covered with its own sickening shade of purple. The walls are lilac, the seats magenta, and the carpet violet. None of the other students seem to mind, though. Everyone is well dressed and complacent. We could be waiting to board a cruise. Just as I am beginning to get seasick sitting in purgatory, Dr. Mortenson comes to my rescue. Dr. Mortenson is a psychiatrist, meaning she is licensed to pre- scribe medication. Four floors up from the Union basement’s Subway restaurant, her office perpetually smells like $5 Foot Longs. Like the rest of CAPS, Morten- son’s small workplace lacks a win- dow. She gestures to a mirror on the back wall. “That’s my window,” she jokes, sadly. Impressive degrees line the walls, including a medical degree from Columbia University. We make small talk for a second, and then she asks me to have a seat in one of two squishy gray chairs, positioned across from one anoth- er. Sitting, I can’t shake the feeling that I am a patient and Mortenson is about to prescribe me medica- tion. We speak in soft, intimate voices, and my questions sound almost like guilty confessions. When I ask, “What are the cri- teria you use to prescribe medica- tion?” I could be admitting, “I’m having trouble sleeping.” Usually, patients come to Mortenson because they’re already considering the option of medica- tion. By the time a patients are sit- ting across from Mortenson in one of those comfy gray chairs, many have already tried other approach- es, like going to talk therapy, eating better and working out more. “Usually by the time I see them those changes have not been work- ing and they are pretty symptom- atic,” Mortenson says. Mortenson’s job is to diagnose the patient with a disorder and then decide what medication would be most appropriate for that particu- lar patient. I ask her whether this process is difficult. “Not really,” she says, shaking her short blonde hair from side to side. The DSM-V — Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders — lists specific criteria for every type of mental illness. Mortenson makes her diagnosis based on a checklist. When I ask Mortenson if she ever tries to talk her clients out of taking medication, she says no. The way she sees it, that is not her job. Her job is to help people. “If you have a medicine or proce- dure to help somebody, you do it.” she says, her blue eyes shining like morphine stars. “What would that mean to withhold treatment that we know works for a lot of people?” I try to see Mortenson as a vil- lain for prescribing drugs so freely, but I can’t. I think about my father. When I call him with an ear infec- tion or a headache or a sore throat, he brings me medicine. He never tells me that drugs are not the answer or that I should try other methods first. He just treats the ill- ness. In the 2013-2014 academic year, CAPS had 20,000 mental health care appointments. It’s no coinci- dence that University therapy cen- ters like CAPS see so much action. College is a huge stress inducer. “It’s a tough time in life,” Mari- lyn Gilbert, the psychologist, had told me. “There’s a lot of pressure to succeed and be academically pres- ent and to get a job and see what your life situation is.” For the most part, students beginning college are also away from their normal social support system — friends, families, doc- tors — for the first time. This loss is extremely challenging for many students and can act as a trig- ger, especially for those who have already been struggling with their own mental health. Additionally, there is much, much higher substance use during college years compared to other periods of life. Binge use of alco- hol, weed and other drugs is stan- dard practice on college campuses. It is easy for a student to turn to substances when they are feeling down. And it’s also extremely dan- gerous. “Alcohol is a depressant,” Gilbert said. “It’s tempting because it takes away the bad feelings, but it really adds to the depression.” Playing into all of these factors are the raging hormones associ- ated with one’s late teens and early twenties. “It’s a time when your body is developing, and there are a lot of hormonal issues that come into play,” Gilbert said. Young women have much higher levels of sex hormones than young men, causing their moods and feel- ings to be much more affected by hormonal changes. This is partly why a much greater number of young women struggle with mental health disorders than men. At the University, Maria drinks more alcohol and smokes more weed — the size of the bong in her room attests to this fact — than she did in high school. All of her manic episodes have occurred while she was extremely drunk, and these episodes ultimately led to her diag- nosis with bipolar disorder. In contrast, Raina was affected more by the lack of social ties she experienced when she first came to college. As a freshman, she was going to Michigan State practi- cally every weekend to visit her high school boyfriend. She went to CAPS initially due to loneliness. “I was having trouble making friends because I was gone all the time,” she told me. I think of my own sadness at the start of college, how unbearable it was. I can’t blame Raina for want- ing medication when the feeling remained strong a year later. For me, the depression had ebbed over time. At least a little bit. It’s 2 a.m., and I’m lying in bed trying to sleep, but I can’t stop wor- rying about Maria. When I stopped by her room after tennis practice, she was clearly under the influence. Whether it was from her hefty stash of weed, her meds or some- thing else, I can’t say, but she told me the Klonopin was making her all wobbly (“I just like, wobble. I don’t fall”). She was going through a hard break-up, which was partially why I visited her. While we had been talking, she stuck her right arm out toward me with her palm facing up, like a child sticks out her tongue after just fin- ishing a lollipop. Slashed across her wrist like ink were three bright red, lateral slits. Wednesday, January 21, 2015 // The Statement 8B GLUE From Page 5B Read the rest of this article online at MichiganDaily.com LUNA ANNA ARCHEY/DAILY LUNA ANNA ARCHEY/DAILY