Talking to Faculty – A Student’s Perspective

My words for the helpers and professionals in academia:

Mental illness is all-consuming—you can’t isolate it. Family, school, work, sense of self are all affected. It’s insidious. Lots of different things can make a student’s life better, so please communicate with each other. You can’t be holistic unless the parts of the whole work together. As a student, it makes you think: These people are concerned about me—I’m not just a screw-up. Keep a stack of confidentiality waivers on your desk. It’s great when someone cares about you enough to talk about you behind your back.And what can the entire university community do to best support students with mental illness? Remember that students are just as likely to go to Elliot the porter, Mike the maintenance man, Jennifer the admin assistant. Not just counseling staff. t thrive here, too. There is a caveat: many students have the onset of mental illness during these crucial education years, which never showed up before this. These are precious years, which is why early intervention is so essential. Part of what I did to be successful is that I went into university knowing I had a disability, even if I hoped it was temporary. I applied to university from a psych ward.

I initially went to post-secondary institution mostly because of their mental disability services and because it is in close proximity to Hospital, one of the best psychiatric hospitals in North America.  At my school, they told me there that it was no big deal to go to hospital; some professors go every year, especially in the winter. I was lucky when I transferred and got to my new school. I had the Dean and Assistant Dean of Students, the Residence Academic Don for English (my academic specialty), the Registrar, and Retention Officer to keep me in school even when I had to drop out twice. They came together as a team to try to help me and each served a different role. What is it like to be in university with a mental health issue? There’s a rap lyric for every occasion in life, so I thought I would share this one with you. In the words of Shawn Carter, a.k.a., Jay Z, “I shoulda been did it but I been in a daze though” Feeling that you should have “been did it” (as in, done something a long time ago). You know what you’re supposed to do, but you can’t because of the “daze” you’re in. Holding on by the edge of it just to keep up, trying to predict and manage your moods, trying to be put together in class, even making sure residence neighbors don’t see you crying. Having what I called my Sylvia Plath days. Hiding is a full-time job at times. It’s very hard to have to drop out of school and come back again and again, all the while having to start from scratch. Financially, it’s punishing. On top of that, it’s hard to come back at the top of your game when your skills have gotten rusty from lack of use.

 Now back to some advice. What helped me?

 Knowing that people I admired thought I was smart, and they cared and were concerned with my well-being when I wasn’t productive, which I thought was all that mattered. I put a lot of pressure on myself to be productive, and when I couldn’t, I felt worthless. My advice to students: Find your people. Find at least one person who gets it and gets you. You deserve to find your niche and belong somewhere. To professionals and staff: Be one of those safe people. I was scared; it’s scary! There is so much unfamiliar territory. You need people to make you feel safe. Work together as a university community, to break down silos. Be friends to one another. That leads me to a quotation from one of my favorite books of all time, Toni Morrison’s Beloved. I think this quotation is instructive of how we should treat one another, especially those of us who are mentally ill:

 Suddenly [Paul D] remembers Sixo trying to describe what he felt about the Thirty-Mile Woman. “She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.”

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