Vivi22 said:
Nielas said:
College can be extremely stressful and students flip out for all sorts of reasons. Heck, there were a few semesters during my university days where I have to plead temporary insanity for some of the horrible decisions I made under stress.
True, college can be stressful enough under the best of circumstances, but then you can have people pulling all nighters, sometimes more than once in a row, and people can get kind of crazy. My best friend once spent the better part of two days in the computer lab with not more than a couple of hours sleep crammed in somewhere. He said he went to one of his classes and was starting to hallucinate and came to the realization that the formula for Jesus' love was Crucifix squared. After that he just went home and crashed because he knew he'd been up far too long.
Oh man, I stayed up for five days with about five hours sleep in total (sleep deprivation makes you think more sleep deprivation will make more things get done), by the last day I hallucinated fish coming out of my professor's face during physics lecture.... a pixelated goldfish. Still went to my next class, because I make great and wise decisions like that.
OT: College can cause weird stressful breakdowns, I've seen it. People get paranoid and deluded and flip a shit. It's generally because they're in an unfamiliar place, with completely new expectations, far less structure than they're used to, and no coddling. A lot of people complain their freshman year that college professors aren't fair, have ridiculous expectations (OMG I HAVE TO STUDY? This is so not fair! In high school I didn't even do homework, they shouldn't expect us to in college! [that's a quote from a girl I knew, sad as that is]) and often will tell students that their incorrect theories are, in fact, bullshit. It's particularly problematic with evolution, because if you come from a place where all of your beliefs about yourself and society are based on an incorrect interpretation (or denial of) evolutionary theory, getting told that it's wrong with either force complete re-evaluation of your outlook, or spark rage and contempt. Added on top of a new, often more liberal and varied environment, people will lash out.