Scouting the Territory

    My current blog topic is how isolation due to Covid-19 affects college students' mental health. I really like this topic but I also am very conflicted. The topics we have been going over for class and for the analytical essay are also really interesting and I feel like I can relate to them a lot more. I am still unsure as to which one I want to do because they are both so engaging. They both seem promising I think I need to do further research and come to a decision after that. As I continue researching multiple topics, I think I'm going to stick with my initial topic of mental health and Covid-19. As I was doing some looking around, I found a multitude of articles and papers discussing this topic. A few phrases and words I used to find these sources were “Covid-19 and mental health," and “Covid-19 and college students mental health." So far that is all I looked up but with those I found more than enough sources. Some things I found was that though the mitigation of the pandemic was necessary, there were still heavy impacts on college students' overall mood and wellness of first year students at universities. I could only imagine what it would be like starting the first year of college online and missing out on those first friendships and experiences that everyone remembers forever. Some other issues that are discussed are that these psychological issues are without a doubt here and students are not afraid to make it known. I used Google scholar so Wikipedia did not show up, but when I did look there wasn't much on my specific topic. Some articles that seem important are articles on Science Direct, and this one news article by Science News, discussing how the pandemic has made students' mental health much worse. Something that seem really important was suicide rates, and even overall mental health and how it has just depleted so much over this past year. And prior to the pandemic people have already experienced high anxiety, stress, and depression and that the isolation has made things much much worse. 

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/covid-19-coronavirus-pandemic-us-college-students-mental-health

This link is useful because it emphasized on the variety of students that were significantly affected by the pandemic and gave statistics about those individuals. Those who were under the age of 25, women, asian people, those in poor health, those who knew family members or friends who suffered from coronavirus, and of course lower income students. I feel like this gave me a better insight to those affected. 

Another source I found useful was https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0890856720319882?via%3Dihub

This site had a plethora of information and data on all types of students… more than the one above. This link was research directly conducted on students. These researchers also had more interaction with these students which had more accurate information. I also found it interesting how they had recorded their changes in emotional and behavioral function which will also be very helpful when writing my paper. 

Unfortunately I did not find any controversies, just because I think this pandemic has made mental health even more important and I don't think it would be ethical to question the state of students especially during such a hard time.