THE EFFECT OF DEPRESSION ON COLLEGE STUDENTS ACADEMIC

PERFORMANCE

Rhea A. Papasin

Depression is a medical condition that can affect a student's ability to work, study,

interact with peers, or take care of themselves. Symptoms of depression may include:

difficulty sleeping or sleeping too much, appetite changes, withdrawing from participating

in activities once enjoyed, feelings of sadness, hopelessness, unhappiness, and difficulty

concentrating on school work. Symptoms of depression can also leads to thoughts of

suicide. Due to the high prevalence of depression in students, DeRoma et al., (2009), it

is important to understand how it impairs everyday life to create interventions to help

sufferers live without impairment. Depression can appear gradually or suddenly with

varying reasons including life events, academic pressures, and lack of social support,

Addis, Truax & Jacobson (1995). The aforementioned symptoms can have damaging

effects in many aspects of sufferer’s lives from social engagements to academic

performance.

Depression has been found to correlate strongly with decreased academic

performance but only in moderate depression, in severe depression perfectionism is a

buffer to damaging effects, (DeRoma et al., 2009). They found that moderate depression

threatens self-esteem, therefore decreasing belief and leads to self-handicapping in

certain tasks thus negatively affecting academic potential.

This self-defeating perspective owes to a lack of constructively using negative

performance to better overall performance in these individuals. A limitation of DeRoma

etal.,(2009) was the measure of academic performance through self-reported Grade Point

Average (GPA). GPA is a snapshot evaluation of how an individual has performed in one

area of academia, thus it is not representative of their overall performance. Furthermore,

a snapshot GPA can be influenced by many biases such as content, interest or daily

mood. For further research to determine whether depression negatively affects academic

performance a more specific measure must be used.

Decreased academic performance in depressed patients has also been found with

other measures of academic performance by Hysenbegasi et al., (2005) as they used

both objective and subjective measures; GPA and thoughts about academic

performance. It was found that subjective measures correlated higher with decreased

academic performance than objective measures, even though they were both significant.

With more accurate reports from subjective measures, understanding an individual’s own

perspective on the reasons behind their depression will help explain the difference in

effects on academic performance from different individuals.

Therefore, depression occurs during adolescence, a time of great personal

change. Many college students suffer from this. It has become increasingly predominant,

many stating these mental health issues as their biggest barriers to do well in school

which affects their academic performance, student’s personality, education, motivation,

mental health and training which every individual have to perform in all cultures has

become an important goal of the educational process which I think needs to have an

improvement in mental services and resources for university students. Easily accessible

mental health services and educating students about the benefits of seeking interventions

may encourage students to seek help if they need it.

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Dr. Chaudry. A. (2015). EFFECTS OF DEPRESSION ON STUDENTS' ACADEMIC

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Rachel (2016). The effect of depression on academic performance. Retrieved October

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