Marshall University’s Psychology Department will offer a depression screening for students Thursday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. in the Psychology Clinic on the fourth floor of Harris Hall. The screening will be able to help those get a proper treatment for free.

The origin of National Depression Day screening started 25 years ago, and the clinic at Marshall will be giving a screening for its third year.

Students attending will fill out a paper of brief questions relating to symptoms of depression, then enter a room with one of the graduate students who will score the measure and talk about their results.

Those who receive a certain score will be given information regarding available treatment on campus and providers in the community.

Brittany Canady, psychology professor, is organizing the screening for students.

“If someone has depression or symptoms of depression and hasn’t received treatment, it can be very beneficial for a student to do the screening,” Canady said. “Generally, we are able to get people into treatment pretty quickly if they are interested in doing that. We do know that treatment tends to be quite effective for depression, as well as certain other mental disorders.”

Ashley Sansone, graduate student in Marshall’s PsyD Clinical Psychology Program, is also organizing the screening has been a volunteer since it has started on campus.

“I think the screening happening is great because being involved in the process, there has been many students that come in and say that they feel like they might have symptoms of depression and just wanted to get checked to make sure,” Sansone said. “Being able to give them feedback, either way, I think it has been a really big benefit to a lot of students on our campus.”

Canady said in previous years, the clinic has had success in diagnosing students with depression, which then allowed them to be treated. 

“We’ve done this for the past two years, and there have been about 60 people that attended the screening.” Canady said. “We know that many of those has followed up with treatment, so we know this is a service that people keep using.”

Those not able to attend the screening can also visit the clinic or the Counseling Center on campus at any time during the day if there are feelings of depression or any other mental illness.

Alison Baldridge can be contacted at [email protected].