Depression is widespread among college students. As many as 78 percent of college students suffer some symptoms of depression. Forty-six percent of the students have intense enough depression to make some professional help appropriate. At least twice the rate of suicides occur among college students each year as among nonstudents of similar age.

Why are these students, a more competent and advantaged group than the general population, such easy prey to depression? There are many possible reasons. Many students are living away from home for the first time. They must cope with situations that require new kinds of adaptive behaviors. In addition, because colleges bring together the most talented and achieving students from many high schools, staying at the top is much harder, and competition is fierce. Many students who have always been near the top of their classes can't face the prospect of a less outstanding position. Often students aren't sure what career they want to follow. They may spend time feeling guilty about the money their parents are spending on their education and feel an obligation to be successful even when they have no clear idea of what to do with their lives. At first, they may have few people to whom they can turn for comfort or reassurance. Their old friends are back home, and the effort required to make new friends may cause some anxiety. Severe loneliness and feelings of isolation result.

Self-destruction is also a serious problem among college students. The suicide rate for the college population is 50 percent higher than for the general population. Each year 100,000 college students threaten suicide and some 1,000 actually kill themselves. This problem is found not only in the United States, but in European countries, India, and Japan as well. During a nine-year period, twenty-three students enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley committed suicide. Compared to their nonsuicidal classmates, these students appeared to be moody, drove themselves harder, and were depressed frequently. Their depression often took the form of extreme agitation. Most of them gave recurrent warnings of their suicidal intent. The major precipitating factors seemed to be worry about schoolwork, concerns about health, and difficulties in their relationships with others.

Most of the students who feel depressed do not seek professional help either within the college or from outside sources. They try to handle the problem by working harder, by talking to friends, or by dropping out. Colleges have tried to cope with these problems in a variety of ways.

Perhaps one effective way to reduce this problem is to make students aware that what they are experiencing is not unique. The majority of students have the same discomforts. This might help them decide more intelligently how to deal with depression and where to seek help. Rather than attributing academic difficulties to intellectual deficiencies, the student might be made aware that emotional stress and depression may cause sadness and less motivated behavior, which also might interfere with academic performance.

HEALING UNDER HYPNOSIS

Hypnosis means sleep in Greek. Maybe that's why the prevailing opinion is that it is a passive state in which a person's will is paralyzed. In real life, however, hypnosis is a special state of the human's psychic activities and of the nervous system. Experiments staged by Vladimir Raikov, a well-known psychotherapist, showed that abilities which the subjects hadn't even suspected they have before may be aroused in them in a hypnotic state.

For example, under hypnosis, a first-year student at a conservatoire performed piano pieces with the skill of a first-class master. Others subjected to the test started playing chess about two categories of skill higher. The important thing is that the aroused abilities do not disappear after hypnosis. If the people were doing drawings under hypnosis, then after 15 to 20 sessions their drawings could well be displayed at professional exhibitions.

Hypnosis helps in curing people of illness. It is suggested to the patient that he is healthy. The patient trains for about a month to learn how to arouse this feeling of health in himself. The feeling of health becomes a habit, which, in its turn, mobilizes the organism to combat the disease.

Hypnosis can heal hypertension, angina pectoris, cardiac diseases, ulcers at early stages, and many neuroses.

TASTE AND SMELL LESSEN WITH AGE

The senses of taste and smell are inextricably connected, and both can have a profound effect on appetite. In elderly persons, the neurological functions that govern these senses decrease with age as a result of age-related neuron loss, and the elderly lose the intensity of taste and smell that they possessed when younger. This can lead to a concomitant decline in appetite, which may lead to nutritional problems, reported the American researchers.

The scientists used an olefactometer to compare the abilities of college students and elderly people to detect and discriminate odors. The groups were matched as much as possible for background and socio-economic level, both of which can be important factors in familiarity with tastes and smells.

College students are able to detect an odor at much lower concentrations than are elderly people. This change in threshold affects eating not only because odor itself can stimulate appetite, but also because some people notice a bitter taste in foods that they are unable to smell. The scientists report that a significantly greater percentage of elderly persons complained of a bitter flavor in foods that tasted normal to younger subjects. For the elderly, this may mean that foods they once enjoyed no longer taste good.

A decreased sense of smell among elderly persons held true not only for food, but for less pleasant odors as well. The researchers tested their subjects with urine like odors, and found that aged subjects had even more difficulty detecting those odors than they did detecting the food smells. They believe that this may account for the tolerance in the elderly of the sometimes malodorous atmosphere of nursing homes and hospitals. Many younger persons say that they can't stand to work there because of the smell, although older residents seem unbothered.

The scientists also found that elderly persons lose the ability to discriminate between unlike tastes, as well as to identify familiar ones. They prepared foods to make them identical in consistency, then tested them on blindfolded subjects. For elderly persons, things began to taste the same. The person might be able to detect a taste, but not be able to tell what it is. For example, only 55 percent of the elderly subjects recognized the taste of apple, while 61 percent of the college students identified it correctly. Many elderly persons prefer fruit flavors, however, because the ability to taste these flavors often lingers longer.

The explanation for this decline in sensory ability may lie in the fact that tastes are coded across neurons. For example, there is a difference in the codes for salty tastes and for bitter tastes. With age we drop neurons, and so with age there is less difference between the two patterns. If a person needed a total neural mass of, say ten, to detect taste, he may need a larger mass to discriminate between tastes.

THE MEANING OF DREAMS

Nearly half of all women admit they dream several times a night but usually have no idea what the dreams mean. That's a pity because your dreams can tell you a lot about yourself. During an average night you'll drift into light sleep and then deep sleep. You'll go through five of these hour-long cycles. Before each new cycle – for between 10 and 30 minutes – you'll be in dreamland: an unstructured world where nothing is impossible.

By studying your dreams you can learn a great deal about yourself. Overweight people dream more than thin. Women dream more than men: 45 per cent of women say that they dream several times a night, but only 34 per cent of men say they dream that often.

It is possible to choose what to dream about. As you fall asleep, make sure that the last thing on your mind is the scene or person you want to dream about. But be warned. It is impossible to decide exactly what is going to happen. Your plans for a night of romantic passion could easily turn into something else.

A growing number of scientists believe that premonitions - either when you are awake or when you are in dreamland — may be just as real as other senses. But if you regularly have dreams about terrible things happening to you or those you love, you are almost certainly not dreaming about things that are going to happen but events that you are worried about.

If you dream of TV stars, this may mean that you want your life to be more exciting. If you felt inferior, then your confidence probably needs a boost.

A dream about death may signify you are looking forward to something about to happen - a new job or a new relationship, for example.

SKEPTICISM AND HUMILITY

The first scientific attitude, skepticism, spurs us to check our ideas against observation. Because our intuitive hunches are prone to error, scientists typically approach them with an attitude of open-minded doubt. Do parents and infants "bond" more closely with one another if allowed body contact during the first hour after birth? Can movie theater owners motivate you to buy popcorn by flashing an imperceptibly brief image of the words "eat popcorn" on the screen? Can astrologers analyze character and predict your fu­ture based on the positions of the planets at the moment of your birth?

All such claims can be tested with open-minded skepticism: If they are refuted—as the above claims have been—we can reject them; if they are confirmed, we can reject the skepticism. It is by careful scru­tiny of competing ideas that we sift profound insights from believable fantasies. Over and over again we will see that the scientist's attitude is like a detective's. The energetic scientist is a sleuth who checks various leads, dismissing most, but verifying some.

The scientific ideal is also one of humility. Scientists know that their personal opinions are never the last word. So they test their ideas and then report their research precisely enough to allow others to replicate (repeat) their observations, usually by recreating the essence of a study and seeing whether they get the same results. If, when tested, nature does not conform to our ideas, then so much the worse for our ideas. If animals or people do not behave in accord with the expectations of a psychological theory, then so much the worse for the theory. This is the attitude expressed in one of experimental psychology's early mottos: "The rat is always right."

This attitude of humility before nature is not always apparent in the behavior of scientists who, like anyone else, can have big egos and may cling stubbornly to their pet theories. Nevertheless, historians of science tell us that the attitudes of skepti­cism and humility helped make modern science possible. Many of the founders of modern science were people like mathematician-physicist Isaac Newton, people whose religious convictions emboldened them to think that the created world was worth exploring and that, owing no ultimate allegiance to any human authority, they should humbly ac­cept whatever truths nature revealed.