Depressed?

Stressed? Anxious? Anorexic? Probably. This is Harvard, after all.

On a jaunt through the Yard, the Harvard College undergraduate runs into a flurry of posters and signs urging him to seek help for his various mental health issues.

There is a great deal of concern at Harvard over the emotional wellness of its undergraduates. Owing to the rigorous course load, intense level of competition, and high population of type-A personalities, the college is running on anti-depressants.

Hordes of social advocacy groups exist at Harvard to save its undergraduates from depressing, unrewarding, teetering-on-the-edge-of-serious-mental-breakdown lives. Room 13 will serve students cookies and talk stuff out; Eating Concerns Hotline & Outreach (ECHO) is around to help those students who can’t bring themselves to eat the cookies.

But what these social advocacy groups may fail to realize—or perhaps choose not to acknowledge—is that gloom is en vogue for a reason: happy people are boring. Harvard students aren’t all depressed because there is something wrong with them: they’re depressed because there is something to them.

The Greeks had it right. They held that the smartest of men had the tendency to become the most depressed. Melancholia, the Greek term for “black bile,” was said to foster pensively intellectual thinkers. And in history, so many great leaders have been depressive or unpleasant. Abraham Lincoln’s melancholia often led him to “weep in public and cite maudlin poetry”, according to Lincoln biographer Joshua Shenk ’93, also a Crimson editor. He considered suicide as a young man and growing older, he saw the world as governed by unforgiving fates. His law partner William Herndon said of him, “His melancholy dripped from him as he walked.” Lincoln was depressed, yes. But he was also incredibly successful, and is today rightly celebrated.

To be fair, mental illness is not a joke. Some students do legitimately need professional help to maintain mental wellness. But in the cases of most Harvard students, a moderate level of depression is not surprising.

Harvard students are determined, and they have an investment in success—apart from the $40,000-a-year one. The byproduct of their ambition is an unavoidable lump of negative externalities—downsizing of relationships, severe aspirations, spending a great deal of time studying in the dark corners of Widener, and stress in general. Ultimately, these unfortunate aspects can be, and usually are, outweighed by benefits. The heights of human achievement—music, literature, scholarship: think Nobel prizes—none can be achieved without some degree of alienation, some degree of tears.

And indeed, contentment with one’s personal circumstances is not a surefire route to happiness; living the good life—the tripped-out-on-antidepressants life, that is—may not get you far. Quite the opposite, it may be happiness that brings dissatisfaction. There is no allure in those preppy, joyous smile-alots that roam the cobblestones of Cambridge. They have no secrets, and their opinions are generally uninteresting.

The Harvard community should let its members be real—Harvard is a hard place, and Harvard students want to do well. If that means a higher percentage of anxious twenty-somethings flapping about, so be it. Trying to make Harvard into something it is not, and shouldn’t be—a tribe of perky people gushing—is a mistake.

Harvard will always be on the unbearable side, because Harvard admits its students to be ambitious and to succeed, not to be happy. But the unbearable environment is glorious, because it is the counterpart to the atmosphere of achievement. The negatives must be accommodated. And take heart: someday, these trials will make you a much more interesting cocktail party guest.



Lucy M. Caldwell ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Wigglesworth Hall.