Can siblings get depressed when a student with a student loan leaves home?

Can siblings get depressed when a student with a student loan leaves home?

Leaving home to go and study college or a university education can be a stressful and depressive time for both students and their parents, but it can also be a stressing and depressing time for the siblings. Being the sibling of a student with a student loan student can put additional stress on the sibling not only because their parents will turn and focus all their attention and effort on him or her. Also because being the second child, parents will tend to encourage him or her on excellence grades so that there is a chance for a scholarship.

This applies not only to the second child –if in the household there are only two children- but also to the rest of siblings. The attention will become more and more stressful as the previous siblings slowly start to leave the home and continue their lives outside the family home; this can make the stress to the smallest of the siblings almost unbearable.

Therefore, it is plausible that sibling might suffer from depression when their older brothers or sisters leave home to continue their own education at college or the university. Naturally, it is likely that their parents will be able to catch such depression long before it turns dangerous, but still, the student’s role in detecting if any of his or her siblings is suffering from depression can be the difference between life and death.

It is a known fact that while most grown ups handle depression as a shopping spree madness or any other similar action or attitude, young people tend to be more dramatic and react accordingly, either loosing themselves in vice or even deciding that life is not worth living and killing themselves –or others in the way.

But the student as a sibling has a unique access to the world of his or her siblings because he or she has access to his or her sibling’s friends and young world and will provide his or her parents with a perfect filter. Suitable for the information that they should be gathering from the people with whom their child or children interact on a daily basis, sifting all potentially valuable information from the rubbish of hearsay and gossip.

It is important that both the student and his or her parents are aware that sometimes depression in young people is only evident when it is too late, and that depression can affect anyone of the children or even all of them at once.