I don’t think anyone would blink twice if they came across a Buzzfeed article entitled, “11 Reasons College is The Best Four Years of Your Life.” No, there are hundreds of reasons why college can be a paradise for the human mind.

However, the reality is a bit different.

Results of the 2014 National College Health Assessment showed that one-third of undergraduates “felt so depressed that it was difficult to function” at some time within the past year, and about a third of those were professionally diagnosed with depression.

Unfortunately, there are more worrying statistics on student mental health. I cringed when I discovered that almost nine percent of undergraduates seriously considered suicide at some point within the past year.

It is clear that the high rate of depression among college students is an issue in need of better solutions. I’m no psychiatrist, but I believe that fresh ideas can be found in non-reductionism and philosophy.

These ideas only make sense in response to the current approach to mental health – reductionism. In general, reductionism means breaking a thing down to its individual parts and causes in order to understand it.

Physical reductionism, in respect to depression, posits that there are physical deficiencies in our brains’ neurons which need to be treated.

Its motto is best expressed by neurophysiologist Ralph Gerard: “Behind every crooked thought lies a crooked molecule.”

Against this approach is the simple fact that anti-depressants have a poor track record.

More generally, physical reductionism wrongly assumes that positive feelings from medication imply prior deficiency.

Feeling relaxed from a beer in the evening does not mean that one was previously lacking in alcohol.

When a person tries to talk through their problems and emotions, they are attempting psychological reductionism.

This could happen in counseling, for example, when an ill person tries to discover the causes of his or her depression.

But when we start to think about our lives, we realize that this is no easy task. The chain of events that happens to create us is superbly complex, and satisfying answers about our own thoughts and actions sometimes seem out of reach.

Furthermore, college students encounter a broad range of depressing events, so each case is unique.

Because of this, I think that a non-reductive approach to depression is well-suited for college students.

We have to recognize that a background feeling of depression comes from a complex chain of events.

When we think non-reductively, we focus on the whole, the subjective account of experience; treatment would be thinking about and experimenting with new, organic mindsets for ourselves.

What can philosophy do for those suffering from depression?

For many, philosophy concerns itself with issues such as freedom, grounding and time. In light of research showing that depressed patients have distorted these concepts, I think that depressed college students could find meaning or conceptual strength in philosophy.

In the end, figuring out a way to deal with depression is a difficult issue.

I don’t want to take away from the amazing benefits of modern medicine and counseling, but the college student depression rate is a growing social problem that we could combat with new ideas.

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