Not afraid to ask for help Health Center assists students who need support

ANNA CLARK Opinions Editor @AnnaClarkReport

The number of Pierce College students being hospitalized due to suicidal ideations are higher than they have ever been.

But that shouldn’t be considered a bad thing.

With a total of nine students and 11 hospitalizations, Pierce administrators are speaking out on how the hospitalizations are bringing hope into the dark world of depression.

Clinical psychologist Niaz Khani, who supervises over mental health at the Pierce College Health Center, said that the act of hospitalizing a student is meant to help, not hinder.

“When the hospitalization comes into place, it's not meant to be a punitive process,” Khani said. “It's meant to get more attention for the person's suffering.”

In fall 2017, eight Pierce College students were hospitalized a total of 10 times due to thoughts of suicide.

On the first day of the spring 2018 semester, a student was hospitalized, increasing the number to nine students and 11 hospitalizations.

The topic of mental health has broadened across the Pierce campus, with a Suicide Awareness Week being held this past fall.

Khani said the awareness week could be a factor in the increased rate of hospitalizations, as it focused on teaching students about what signs to look for and how to recognize their feelings.

“I personally don't think that more people are feeling suicidal than before,” Khani said. “My hunch is that they’re just knowing more about what to do and what kind of resources they could have possible.”

Health Center Director Beth Benne said that students who are thinking of suicide have come to the health center because of information that was handed out during the awareness week.

Cheating on tests can make an easy comeback

Students who may want to cheat and plagiarize their way through college may now have their chance.

During the Academic Senate meeting, Distance Education Coordinator Wendy Bass announced the end of a partnership with the antiplagiarism company VeriCite, that also owns Turninit.

Bass said Pierce College had a contract with Turnitin.com that cost the school about $20,000. But the company upped the fee to more than $33,000, so Pierce moved to VeriCite, which provided professors and students access to their services for free.

Yet, now that VeriCite was recently bought by Turnitin, the contract is now terminated. If students and teachers want access to VeriCite’s or Turnitin’s anti plagiarism services they will now have to “pay for it themselves,” Bass said.

Based on analytics from Bass, in 2015, out of 125 instructors using Turnitin for plagiarism checking, 81 percent of them submitted less than 100 papers. Bass reported they couldn’t justify spending that amount of the college’s budget on a plagiarism checker that not many instructors use, so they switched to the free VeriCite.

“We were handing out our name and our addresses, and that's a good thing, if that person had been suffering in silence,” Benne said.

According to Khani, feelings of depression and anxiety are a part of being human.

“We have a lot of people in this society who are feeling depressed and anxious, and I think that is completely normal because things are always changing in our world,” Khani said. “There's always things happening, so of course that's going to bring up feelings. “

According to Vice President of Student Services Earic Dixon-Peters, everyone in the world has been