The Queen of Hearts, Minds and the Grand Canyon State

“College has an amazing way of making it okay to not get out of bed in the morning,” says Laura M. Lawless ’00. Many of her years at Harvard were troubled with depression, but when she did get out of bed, she got moving. Lawless, now 23, is currently the reigning Miss Arizona, and when she finishes touring the country to raise awareness about mental health, she’ll get around to finishing her law degree at Arizona State University. Lawless grew up in New York, where she competed in the Junior Miss pageant in high school. At Harvard, she sang in the Radcliffe Choral Society and concentrated in psychology. Her junior year at Harvard, she found a way to help pay the tuition bills: she took the crown for Miss Freeport, Mass., a pageant open to out-of-state contestants, and competed in the Miss Massachusetts pageant, playing classical piano for her talent.

But behind the swimsuit catwalks and glittering tiaras, things were more complicated. Lawless had been diagnosed with clinical depression at the age of 17. At the time, she responded well to medication, beginning her freshman year at Harvard feeling optimistic. But come sophomore fall, things weren’t going quite as well. And despite Lawless’s positive past experience with treatment, she was reluctant to seek help. “I wanted to fix it myself,” she says, and is first to acknowledge the irony of that statement, coming from a psychology concentrator.

She had a long distance boyfriend in New York, and looking back, she says he was yet another justification for her isolation. Lawless avoided the dining hall and ate in her room, but as she fell into a cycle of depression, she only felt worse. She says the achievements of her fellow undergraduates only compounded her insecurity.

“Sometimes I thought that the smartest person at Harvard was living in my room,” recalls Lawless, “And it wasn’t me.” Still, she says that roommate, Caroline Kung ’00, was a major source of support during those difficult years. The two remain friends, though Kung now lives in Hong Kong.

Despite her initial refusal to seek help, Lawless found herself at University Health Services (UHS). Overall, she says, she had a good experience, notwithstanding the often negative reputation the services have. But yes, they did ask her if she was pregnant several times.

It took awhile for Lawless to find the right practitioner. She lucked upon psychopharmacologist Winthrop Burr. “I credit him with saving my life,” she says. “He never quit.”

Burr also intervened with the dean and the psychology department to enable her recovery. Lawless was allowed to withdraw from a class past the deadline and to take some of her senior year classes pass/fail.

She also dropped her thesis. “I thought then, ‘If I don’t write this thesis, I won’t be successful.’ But no one has every asked me about my GPA or my thesis.”

While Lawless says she sees Harvard as one of the model schools in dealing with depression and suicide prevention, she raises concerns, particularly about what she sees as a lack of awareness about the resources available.

Lawless worries that when the flurry of Harvard activity finally dies down around 1 a.m., it leaves many students alone with their anxiety. She says she wishes that more students realized that UHS after hours is not only for physical injury—the Mental Health Services are also available 24 hours a day.

Before seeking help, Lawless remembers wondering, “Will these [psychiatric] records follow me?” She discovered the separation between medical and psychiatric files; the latter are not routinely accessible. Lawless says the biggest problem here is the administrative attitude, which dictates that “there are no problems at Harvard.”

She says she was also frustrated that she lived in Old Quincy—with the same group of tutors for three years—and none ever asked how she was doing, despite her obvious signs of isolation. She remembers, “I thought that I was an independent adult, but I was just getting started.”

While freshman proctors are meant to watch over their students, Jim Freeman, who has been a tutor in Kirkland House for two years, says that the role of a tutor is sometimes better described as an “academic role model.” Tutors receive a few days of training in the fall and have mandatory monthly meetings, he says, but are not specifically responsible keeping tabs on every individual in their entryway.

The recently re-activated Mental Health Advocacy and Awareness Group (MHAAG) aims its energies at the areas of Lawless’s concerns. Last week, MHAAG sponsored Mental Health Awareness Week, with panels on topics such as suicide and depression, as well as boards with personal narratives displayed in the Science Center.

According to Sarah J. Ramer ’03, former co-chair of the group, MHAAG is very involved with administrative efforts to improve mental health on campus, and this year it was on the planning committee for the University-wide Caring for the Harvard Community initiative. MHAAG also does tutor-training panels, where “two or three MHAAG members go to a mandatory monthly tutor meeting and speak about their own experiences with mental illness, with an eye towards educating tutors about how they can better recognize and help students who are having problems,” Ramer writes in an e-mail. MHAAG has also been involved in training teaching fellows in how to spot the signs of mental illness.

As for Lawless, her dual duties as Miss Arizona and mental health advocate are more than a full-time job; as a result, she’s taken the year off at Arizona State University law school. She says she makes a whopping 400-500 public appearances during a year, and spends “eight hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year” on various facets of her position. Lawless serves as spokesperson for numerous organizations, including the National Alliance for Mental Illness (NAMI) and the Not My Kid Organization, which she describes as a small but growing mental health advocacy group. These days, Lawless seems to have no trouble getting out of bed in the morning. “I’m out of town as much as I’m in town,” she says cheerfully.