Homesickness adds to struggles of northern students

For Andrew Gliddy, a 26-year old film and television student at Humber College in southern Ontario who grew up in Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nation, his first year at college was not too bad.
Gliddy said he was used to being away from home, having spent five to six years on his own.
The difficulties came in his second year, when a day after frosh week celebrations, he received news that his cousin was murdered.
“That kind of set the tone for what was about to happen. I just really couldn’t focus on school too much,” said Gliddy.
Gliddy said that not being able to go home and properly grieve while handling a full school load in a “demanding program” got to him in a very negative way.
“In terms of dealing with the losses, I numbed myself, because even that following October, another of my cousins passed on,” said Gliddy.
He said he got homesick for the majority of his second year.
Gliddy's case is not unique. First Nations students attending school far from their communities often deal with issues of homesickness, especially when trauma affects family or friends back home.
Unlike their peers who live in the south, it is not often possible to just hop on a plane and fly home when home is thousands of kilometres away.
For Gliddy, returning to his home community halfway through his fourth semester was necessary in helping him deal with the losses of family.
“Being home in my community has helped me in connecting with the losses that affected me, my family, and my community,” said Gliddy.
Gliddy said he felt a sense of closure in returning to his community.
He has plans on returning to Humber College to continue his program in Fall 2012.
Dr. Bob Chaudhuri is a psychiatrist who specializes in trauma, psychotherapy, and suicide prevention among other things. He taught for five years at the medical school in Thunder Bay.
“Homesickness is an important factor for those coming into a large city, especially if they’ve never been there before,” said Chaudhuri.
He said that in psychology, separation anxiety at the university or college level can be traumatizing because students aren’t usually near family – their main support network.
“For First Nations students, having parents up north while they’re in the city can be challenging,” Chaudhuri said, adding that even with modern technology connections are difficult for someone living so far away.
“The thing is, it’s not as effective as say, a mom hugging her son,” said Chaudhuri. “What can happen is they isolate themselves from other people. They end up creating a situation that becomes forced on them.”
“The thing about anxiety that worries me is that since most students can drink legally, some students may take up drinking as an escape," Chaudhuri added. "That gets people in trouble.”
His advice?
“Call your parents, it’s the easiest thing in the world, and make a concerted effort to call at least once a week.”
Aaron Trimble, 21, was in the graphic design program at Humber College, and like Gliddy, found family problems at home conflicted with his concentration at school.
“Before I even started my first year of college at Humber, both my mother and sister were afflicted with different types of illnesses,” said Trimble.
He said his sister had anorexia and bulimia, and his mother had a auto-immune disease “that most people don’t know of.”
His sister overcame her diseases, but his mother was not as fortunate.
“My mom had to go through some experimental procedures that weren’t really done too often on people, and it was done as a means of forcing the disease to be put into remission,” Trimble said.
Trimble said his mother went through a lot of painful surgery during his first year of college. He said that they had to “take her bone marrow out, harvest it with stem cells, and give her a deathly dose of chemotheraphy.”
Trimble said he suffers from a panic disorder, something he has struggled with all his life.
“I worried myself to death about them, which ended up making me sick too. It made my disorder really bad, sparking up a lot of restlessness and lack of sleep for days.”
He said this caused him to barely get through his first year of college.
His second year, he moved into a house with a few of his roommates from residence.
He said that budding disinterest in his program along with the growing responsibilities of living on his own caused an “after wave” of what he went through in first year.”
“The same issues weren’t there anymore, but for whatever reason a lot of the symptoms from my panic attacks were still prevalent,” said Trimble.
Trimble has not yet made up his mind to return to school. He dropped out at the end of his second year.