Using College Mental Health Services Can Lead To Students Getting Removed From Campus
By Tyler Kingkade
Rachel Williams restarted her collegiate career in fall 2013, but that wasn't her decision.
As a freshman who had dealt with severe bulimia and anorexia in the past, Williams developed depression. While at Yale Health Urgent Care to get bandaged in January 2013 for cutting herself, a university psychiatrist came to speak with her.
Williams said she was explicit when she told the psychiatrist the cuts were not a suicide attempt. It was self-destructive behavior, she conceded, but it always made her feel "more in control." Still, Yale officials suggested she leave the university, at least temporarily, and get admitted to the hospital for immediate treatment, she said.
"I realized after a few minutes it wasn't a choice," Williams recalled to The Huffington Post. "I had officially lost my autonomy."
Authorities locked Williams inside the Yale-New Haven Hospital, and later transferred her to the Yale-New Haven Psychiatric Hospital for a week. None of it was voluntary, she said. Days after Williams was released, she was told by the university she needed to go home to continue therapy, withdraw from college, and apply for readmission in the fall.
Williams returned in fall of 2013, and went public about her experience in a January 2014 column in the Yale Daily News.
Another Yale student, a current senior who asked to remain anonymous, said the university contacted her parents and strongly suggested she get treatment before her first day as a freshman. But even after getting treatment, the university told the student to take time off. Because Yale has a policy that students cannot start their education halfway through the year, that bumped her back from the class of 2014 to the class of 2015.
"Your immediate reaction is to be angry and extremely pissed off and embarrassed because you have to go through all this," the Yale senior said. "You realize as you go through Yale, this happens to lots of people, but it feels like it's just you, like you're the only fucked-up person."
Some of the same universities criticized by students who sought help for mental health -- like Yale, Northwestern University and Princeton University -- also signed up to work with the non-profit Jed Foundation to examine how they handle student mental health. Jed just announced that 55 colleges are examining their services, focusing on medical leave policies.
Yale spokesman Tom Conroy wouldn't talk about specific students' cases, but called involuntary leaves a "last resort," noting most are voluntary.
"An involuntary leave is only recommended when there is a very severe and unremitting problem that makes it impossible for a student to function," Conroy said. "An involuntary leave in this situation protects the student’s academic standing rather than allowing him or her to fail. Thankfully, most students come back to successfully complete their Yale education."
John MacPhee, the head of the Jed Foundation, said the group would prefer not to see students get kicked out of college due to depression.
"We don't, and it's not our right to, know all of the facts of that particular circumstance, so it's hard to know whether it was handled the right way," MacPhee said. "Our view would be, if it is at all possible, to have the student stay on campus."
Removing a student from campus for "their own good" is controversial, and the stigma may prevent other depressed students from asking for help, some students say...
Read the full article at HuffPost College.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/07/college-mental-health-services_n_5900632.html
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