Even as I started last semester, I knew I would likely have to withdraw. I knew, and I struggled each day to turn around that eventuality because it would only make my problems worse.
Due to a pay issue at work, I lost access to my prescriptions. Complications made me go cold off these medications for eight weeks. They had been prescribed for suicidal ideation the year before.
I struggled to keep up as the semester left me further and further behind. I cried, unprompted, in my room; I cried in the Dport basement; I cried over my dinner in Silliman. My dean and advisor emailed and emailed and emailed some more; I never replied. My friends might have texted me, but I wouldn’t know. (I had nothing good to report, which had been my story for a long time.) Other students had probably tried to make conversation with me, but I ducked my head and slipped quickly out of classes. I’d started off the semester discussing psets with other students during office hours, but eventually that stopped too. Some professors understood, but only so much, and you can only get so many extensions. I isolated myself more and more, until the only time I interacted with others was on shifts when I absolutely couldn’t avoid it. I liked teaching the underclassman girls, and sometimes I could see myself at an alternate Yale where I did extracurriculars and had friends.
When I finally walked to the ER, I did so knowing that whatever happened, there was no happy ending. Withdrawal is a status with severe restrictions: no student employment, no access to student health, no easy reinstatement process. After I had a few days to stabilize, however, I started dealing with the practical issues I was facing, and I came to a startling discovery: my dean told me about a new option called medical leave.
I breathed a sigh of relief. I would still be allowed to work, I could retain one of my classes as a credit, and I would get to keep coverage under Yale Health. The school even lined up post-discharge care for my time after the hospital. It was the path to recovery that I’d needed but lacked for so long. It felt strange being supported by an institution that I’d been conditioned, by experience, not to trust.
Before Yale, I didn’t have access to mental health services, so conditions that erupted in middle school went undiagnosed. After getting here, I still wasn’t diagnosed until my junior year—these things take time. All my time at Yale I’d spent trying to cram enough hours in the day to do work and go to classes and get treatment, never completely succeeding and facing draconian consequences when I failed. Last time, I hadn’t even known that hospitalization was an option, and ended up hiding in my room for two weeks before withdrawing. I felt, momentarily, unsure of what to do with myself, without something to struggle against.
I left the hospital feeling more hopeful than I had in a long while. Then, of course, it came—palms open, then clenched. Previously, I’d been actively delaying my trip to the hospital, working long hours, many unbilled, trying to get the many issues with my working conditions resolved before I left, issues that only grew throughout the semester.. Pre-hospital, my manager and I had been arranging a meeting to discuss them; these efforts got curtailed by the trip. When I got out, I had less than a day to get my stuff packed up, and once I transferred to my follow-up care, I would have to catch up on three weeks worth of assignments in a few days. In the midst of all this chaos, my manager reached out about the meeting again. I told them that I couldn’t schedule just then, because even in such a situation, Yale remains strict with due dates for finals. She insisted anyway, and so, while I was working sun up to sun down for a non-negotiable academic deadline, before I had even met with my clinicians at my new program, I relented. (So much for the supposed principle of on-campus employers prioritizing students’ roles as students.)
When I got to the meeting, the manager not only dismissed my complaints of sexism at the workplace, but informed me that I was in trouble for being unresponsive to an email chain in the two weeks leading up to my hospitalization. I went looking for the email she claimed I hadn’t responded to, finding instead a really nasty message from her, one that I luckily hadn’t seen before my hospital visit: she accused me viciously that I hadn’t replied within working hours, even though I responded to her email as soon as I was able to. I should add that I’d been struggling in the office all day, some twenty feet from the managers’ office.
When I pushed back, the management claimed they hadn’t known about my hospitalization, despite my many emails discussing the lack of medication and how it would affect my shifts, despite my many notifications to the managers beforehand, despite my frequent calls to my manager during the month I was hospitalized. If they hadn’t known where I was, why hadn’t they reported me missing?
Underneath the anger was a resignation to the inevitable: where Yale gives with one hand, it takes with the other.
With more gains came more losses. I got a referral for a treatment I’d needed that hadn’t been covered before. My dean was shockingly nice. The story in the hospital had been that I’d maintain access to campus while on leave; yet once I got back, this evaporated. I discovered restrictions on extracurriculars that had previously gone conveniently unmentioned. The biggest frustration was why—why make the process of medical leave needlessly difficult? It’s an obstacle with no point.
Although I knew about the efforts by Elis for Rachel, I didn’t think before the settlement what they were pushing for—a way for students to move forward in emergencies without getting booted wholly from campus—could come to fruition. It did, though; students and alumni fought and won. Even with the settlement, however, I still worry if underclassmen inexperienced in navigating mental health care are given the flexibility to figure out if they need a diagnosis, and how Yale will support them.
As I work on getting back on my feet, I remain guarded but hopeful about what recent changes would mean for this institution. Guarded, because these changes aren’t, on their own, enough; hopeful, because I know that we as students can push Yale closer to enough.
