Towards a Mentally Healthier Harvard

The mental health crisis on campus rages on, and it is still not clear what to do to address the depression and anxiety that plague the student body. Barring the addition of more therapists — which I maintain does not address the central problem — there are two approaches which may improve the mental health of this community: a top down approach, where the existing medical care is made accessible to everyone, and a bottom up approach, where a culture of care and support is allowed to bloom.

Top Down

One of the great ironies of mental health care is that those who need it the most often struggle the most to ask for it. Reaching out for help requires a level of vulnerability and willingness that is incredibly hard to muster while struggling with mental illness. The times in my life that I have most needed a therapist were also the times where I was most resistant to getting one.

It is for this very reason that getting mental health care must be made as effortless as possible.

As it stands, the process to receive mental health care can be difficult and opaque: Counseling and Mental Health Services has long wait times, and poorly explained policies on mandatory leaves of absence can make students resistant to get care.

What’s more, many students are not aware of the resources that are actually available. This is a total bureaucratic failure. The hard problem of providing access to care has largely been solved, but the University has flubbed the final step of execution: making these resources well understood.

Currently, much of the information surrounding mental health resources comes in boring administrative emails (which likely don’t get read). It is high time that TimelyCare and the CAMHS Cares hotline become so familiar to students and faculty alike that they become obvious, approachable frontline treatments.

To make these resources familiar, the campus should first be flooded with information. Info sessions should be run at every house and freshman entryway, posters should coat every bulletin board, and short direct emails should be blasted to every student, repeatedly. It should be impossible to not know how to get psychotherapy or other mental health resources on this campus.

Beyond that, though, mental health access coordinators should be implemented to make access to care effortless. In the moment of a mental health crisis, a student should be able to fire off a text or press a button, and be rapidly connected to someone who will help them navigate the options available to them — such as registering for TimelyCare, accessing peer counseling services, or scheduling with CAMHS through the (remarkably confusing) Harvard University Health Services patient portal. With the right organization, mental health care could be one click away.

Bottom Up

When healthy behavior is easy and incentivized, mental health is far easier to maintain. On the other hand, when students are constantly pushing against the tide, mental health is incredibly difficult to maintain.

This brings us to the second approach to improve mental health here: making Harvard a place where it is already easy to live healthily.

The core components of healthy living worth worrying about are physical health and social wellbeing. A person who is well rested and feels loved and cared for by their friends and family will be much more able to manage the slings and arrows of life.

What sort of campus allows for this mental health? A campus where late night grind sessions aren’t necessary — where extensions are granted, and even lauded, in the name of a good night of sleep. A campus where peer counselors, who take the care of the community into their own hands, are celebrated and compensated for their work. A campus where huge social events — on the scale of Yardfest and Harvard-Yale — happen more often than once a semester, and where clubs are built around fellowship, rather than play-acting as consultants. A campus where the administration understands that the happiness of Harvard students is not a distraction from incredible achievements, but rather an institutional obligation of the highest degree.

Addressing mental health in this fashion may read as trivializing the very significant difficulty of mental illness. To be clear, I do not mean to argue that all mental health concerns come down to sleep, exercise, and friendship. However, it is clinically true that care focused on these areas — such as interpersonal psychotherapy, which focuses on creating and managing healthy relationships — significantly reduces depressive symptoms.

One worries about the extent to which Harvard’s mental health crisis is solvable. The stress and misery of the Harvard student seems to trace its origins to the raw drive for achievement that it takes to get into this school. This place is so dense with opportunity that every second could be spent doing something that will bring us closer to our goals. Faced with such incredible optionality, it can be wildly difficult to say no, and prioritize our own wellbeing.

God knows that I struggle with this in my own life. Still, it is possible to have a culture of striving for excellence without self-destruction. The resources to take care of ourselves are there, though they have not been distributed well. With proper management and a bit of creativity, perhaps we can make this a better place.

Suhaas M. Bhat ’23-’24 is a double concentrator in Social Studies and Physics in Mather House and a leader of Harvard Undergraduate Group Peer Therapy. His column, “Demystifying Therapy,” runs on alternate Wednesdays.