Christine Marino knows how it feels to struggle with depression.
The 21-year-old wants students who also battle depression to know they’re not alone.
To show others, she and members of Alpha Epsilon Delta, a pre-health honor society, passed out 400 brown paper bags to UF students as part of the first “Every Gator Counts” event.
Each bag held an anonymous story from one of about 20 students regarding their struggle with mental illness.
The UF health education and behavior junior said being open about her fight with depression has helped her.
Marino said she hoped the event provided others the opportunity to open up.
“Depression is a parasite,” she said. “It feeds off of doubts while filling you with damaging thoughts. Once you have it, it never really goes away. The only thing you can do is try to fight it.”
AED members asked passers-by to sign a banner that read “Every Gator Really Does Count” and passed out information about on-campus mental health services.
The paper bags symbolized the more than 1,000 college students across the country who commit suicide each year.
The bags also contained silver Hershey’s Kisses.
Marino said she wanted to hold an event about mental health since the start of the semester but didn’t know what she wanted to do exactly.
After the student deaths at Social 28 apartments in January and at Little Hall in early March, she decided the honor society needed to discuss resources available for mental health.
“This was the second loss this semester,” Marino said. “It keeps happening more and more, and it keeps getting swept under the rug.”
Joseph Buss, a UF economics sophomore, said he felt the event helped start a conversation about mental health.
“It’s a topic that is not talked about frequently, and I think that it is difficult for people to get help themselves,” the 19-year-old said.
Marino said she hopes the event helped end the negative stigma surrounding mental illnesses.
“Our brain is such an important organ in the body, and we need to treat it like one,” Marino said.
“We have to stop saying that ‘it’s all in our heads’ because that’s exactly what it is. It is time we do something to alleviate it,” she said.
Michelle Smith, a 20-year-old UF health science sophomore, and Christine Marino, a 21-year-old UF health education and behavior junior, talk to Joseph Buss, a 19-year-old UF economics sophomore, during Alpha Epsilon Delta’s “Every Gator Counts” event. The pre-health honor society passed out 400 paper bags holding anonymous stories of AED members’ struggles with mental illness to let students know they’re not alone.
