teechr.com

In reference to this, it seems like alot of us who pursue greatness through scholarship are a bunch of anxious, depressed and uninspired pipe smokers and pill poppers.  Thats not to say we are bad people - we just need a lil’ sum’n-sum’n to get by.  :-)  I was never one to take it the extreme of swallowin’ pharmaceuticals,  but I wonder if an anti-depressant or some Riddlin would help me progress to Chapter 2.  It’s eerie to believe that my colleagues may have been suicidal or so overcome with apathy and self-doubt that they were on the brink of shutting down. I guess I can’t say that I’m surprised - obtaining a higher education is, in essence, the last bastion of hope.  Next to a Christian heaven (or *insert appropriate faith-based capstone here*), what else do people have to aspire to.  We believe that a graduate degree will give us greater odds for obtaining happiness, success and a career that provides an 80/20 health insurance plan.  Now, come to find out grad-school is an incubator for socio-psychological paralysis and corrosive mental health?

At the University of California at Berkeley, 67 percent of graduate students said they had felt hopeless at least once in the last year; 54 percent felt so depressed they had a hard time functioning; and nearly 10 percent said they had considered suicide

Couple this with a bleek economic outlook, rescinded tenure and depleting endowments… sounds like a recipe for the perfect Pookie to me (minus the high-top fade and yellow teef).