Breaking the Silence

My freshman spring, I failed to attend lecture or section in two classes for 8 weeks. Every night, I would promise myself that I would go the next morning, but when the time came to get out of bed, I simply couldn’t. Inevitably, as I fell further and further behind, it became impossible to catch up on my own; I was completely paralyzed by feelings of failure and inadequacy. Most of all, I didn’t want anyone to know, so I pretended, even to myself, that I wasn’t depressed and everything was fine.

It is not necessary to justify why one is suffering. While I can point to a specific and admittedly uncommon cause for my depression, others are not afforded such a socially acceptable explanation. In March of my senior year of high school, my father died unexpectedly from a massive stroke after heart surgery. My twin sister and I, having lost our mother to cancer when we were 12, worked with our siblings to sell our home as we departed for college. Rather than take a year off before school, I just wanted to move on, so I hid my issues behind the exciting change that is the first year at Harvard.

Even after I failed the midterm for one of my Cores, and skipped the midterm for another, I still couldn’t bring myself to get help. I knew something was wrong, but I kept deluding myself into thinking that I could and would fix my academics, and improved mental health would follow miraculously.

On April 12, my freshman dean contacted me after one of my teaching fellows, whom I had never met, emailed the freshman dean’s office about his phantom student. I was embarrassed at failing but relieved that my pain was no longer a secret, so I went to her office and tried to explain my situation. I left with the relief tempered by a new kind of desperation, as I thought that I would likely fail one or two classes and that the ad board would require me to withdraw for a year. I couldn’t imagine a more embarrassing and frightening consequence than being forced to leave my life at Harvard.

Though one of my professors arranged a way for me to pass with extra work, I had done irreparable damage in my other class and was bound for a failing grade and potential administrative action. My freshman dean e-mailed me that if I wanted the best chance in front of the Ad Board, then I should have a professional vouch for me with “an assessment of the effect your issues had on your ability to manage your academic work.”

In an attempt to save myself, I attended a one-shot meeting with a UHS mental health provider I had never met and bared my soul to convince this doctor to tell a University administrator about my debilitating mental health issues, who would then pass along the information to an unknown number of administrators. I found it sadly ironic that my first interaction with therapy at Harvard was bureaucratic and formal. No one at Harvard had encouraged me to seek help my freshman year until this academic crisis. At a personal level, the strange experience of making a case for my own sadness robbed my mental health of its dignity. As a result, the eventual decision to allow me to remain at school felt like a hollow victory of persuasion rather than a warm gesture of understanding.

My experience may have been unique but I am by no means alone. Whether we can point to a reason or not, we can all understand the difficulty of being depressed at Harvard. In the National Health Assessment survey of Harvard students, 40 percent of participating Harvard undergraduates (over 2,000) agree with the following: “At some point the past year, I have been too depressed to function.” On average, that amounts to two friends in your blocking group, or five people in your section. Further, eight percent of all students said they felt that way 11 or more times in a year. Finally, depression is only one of the many mental health problems any community faces, especially one like Harvard. Anxiety, obsessive compulsiveness, addictions, and eating disorders are all present in our community.

Like me, some students come to Harvard with mental health problems that are exacerbated by the institution, while others develop them here. Responsibility clearly falls on both students and the institution to have an atmosphere that promotes mental health. I propose three areas of change that, while they certainly don’t resolve the entirety of student mental health issues, would have an immediate and long-term positive impact.

A first area of reform is the administration of the academic environment, and specifically the Ad Board. It is a horror for the vulnerable students faced with its inaccessible, administrator-only, bureaucracy that can render dealing with mental health issues a requisite spectacle for mercy rather than a genuine healing experience.

A second area of reform is the health services administration—its provost-led executive council unacceptably lacks student representation. Though they do a commendable job, more could be improved. The absence of student voice at the highest levels may explain why a limit of twelve free visits to mental health people at UHS, rather than the typical state standard of twenty, rushes doctors to diagnose; why mental health providers are sometimes overworked; why non-emergency appointments can take weeks to schedule; and why the typical student is unable to set up a routine meeting time.

A third area of reform would affect all students, not just struggling ones. We need to address the core structural issue of the academic calendar, which exacerbates the problems of our high-stress environment. Some faculty and administrators may fail to understand that our time at home is necessary for stability and to recover from the stress of a college environment. This not only means time to rest and relax, but it also means time to spend with family and friends. Unfortunately, as Harvard’s mental health professionals have agreed, the current calendar renders our academic breaks brief and harried with the stress of looming finals and papers and an unreasonably short length (two or more weeks shorter than most schools).

Furthermore, our strangely short winter break and awkwardly situated intersession typically mean that it is too difficult, brief, and expensive for many students from distant states and, ever increasingly distant countries, to fly home. Even those who return do not have enough time for both friends and family during winter break, and our calendar’s uniqueness means friends are not even home during intersession. Time off from schoolwork would have helped to connect me with my siblings, extended family, and friends in California during my freshman year, but the calendar harshly truncates these opportunities. Let’s face it, Harvard’s calendar hurts students.

My freshman year, no one encouraged me to seek help—help that could have potentially spared me substantial personal pain. Thanks to close friends, I have managed to make large strides toward wellness. However, my recovery was by no means a foregone conclusion—to pretend otherwise would be to ignore our responsibility as a community.

Any genuine attempt to improve mental health at Harvard must be holistic; it requires President Bok and the administration to reform the calendar and ad board, faculty to be understanding, and students to be honest with themselves. After all, if the students encumbered by mental health issues lack institutional support for addressing them or face obstacles to healing with their families, then we, as students, cannot heed Harvard’s call to learn and grow. Now, that would be a real mental health problem.



Ryan A. Petersen ‘08 is a history concentrator in Quincy House. He is president of the Undergraduate Council.