In one, he travels the country as a model for Abercrombie and Fitch, and in the other he is a freshman with a double major in marketing and art. And, like his peers, Wilson has struggled to adapt to college life.
After his friend, Brad, committed suicide on their senior trip in the summer of 2010, Wilson was plagued with debilitating panic attacks.
“I thought I was having a heart attack,” Wilson said. “I would fall to the floor and have to brace myself. I didn’t understand what was going on.”
Wilson met with a counselor and was diagnosed with a mixture of post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. He was put on an antidepressant for the remainder of the summer, but abruptly quit taking his medication at the beginning of the fall semester.
“I didn’t feel myself [when on medication],” Wilson said. “I didn’t feel like I could meet people, and that’s what the first semester of school is all about. I couldn’t take it.”
A few weeks went by in the fall semester, and soon Wilson’s drive to get out of bed and leave his room in the morning had vanished. One night, Wilson’s drive to live vanished as well, and he quickly learned what his friend had gone through only months before with his own handful of pills.
The next morning, Wilson awoke, nauseated and possibly still “medicated,” and hasn’t looked back since. Before today, he has only ever told one person, but now, he is ready to come clean about his past.
“I’m ready to talk about it because I don’t think it will happen again, but I don’t want people watching me 24/7 just in case,” Wilson said. “This is something people need to know, not about me personally, but they need to know the story.”
Suicide is the second-leading cause of death among college students, and this story is only one of thousands.
While the original reasoning for dropping his medication was linked to a physical side effect of the medication, his most prevalent reason has to do with nothing more than the opinions of others.
“It was a pride issue, too,” Wilson said. “I told myself, ‘There’s no reason for me to take it just because something happened. I need to suck it up.’”
Since then, however, Wilson has taken his emotional pain and anguish and turned it into a way to better the Ole Miss and Oxford community.
One concern of Stacey Reycraft, director of Student Disability Services, and Marc Showalter, director of the University Counseling Center, have is the lack of a student-led support and awareness organization for mental illness and suicide.
Wilson and friend Lisa Morris have been working together for months now to iron out the details of their up-and-coming idea, “Talk Out Loud.”
After working out the kinks and applying for a $100,000 grant about a month ago through DoSomething.org, a website dedicated to helping students start programs to better their community, Wilson is hopeful that the organization will make and become an integral part of the mental health awareness scene of Oxford and Ole Miss.
The goal of “Talk Out Loud” is to offer students a safe environment among their peers to discuss their personal problems, issues in the community as a whole and how to educate others on this growing epidemic.
His ultimate goal is to start the organization on the Ole Miss campus and spread it to other schools around the nation.
“A lot of times, people with mental illnesses usually don’t ask for help because they’re embarrassed,” Wilson said. “We need to stop sitting back and waiting for people to show interest - there are plenty people out there with interest, they’re just too afraid, scared or embarrassed. The need is out there. The need isn’t just publicizing it. And we need to help them as soon as we can."
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