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Apr. 27th, 2018 02:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogThis article went around here where I work, an academic medical library. I wrote the following in response. I share it here because it is important to me to be an advocate for awareness of mental health issues.
https://www.insidehighered.com/…/cry-closet-installed-final…
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Maybe this is not the kind of response you’re expecting, but it does give me a place to talk about something that personal experience has made important to me. Sorry if that’s at all inappropriate.
The need for this sort of thing (and there is a need) makes me angry. It’s symptomatic of a real, structural problem in the way academia and higher education works. It is not coincidental that the higher rate of mental illness rates among grad students is statistically significant. You know it’s been a problem for me. It’s certainly a problem for my partner. And a friend of mine working on a doctorate in psychology told me that, despite the fact that these are psychologists and they *know* the expectation structure of academia is not conducive to people doing their best, most efficient work, they *do it anyway* because that’s just how academia is done.
I know it’s worse for med students. When I found a book in our collection that was donated to us in memory of a former student, I looked around for information on him. It turned out he had committed suicide. That led me to reading about how frequent suicides of med students and doctors is; it is a non-trivial problem that it seems like few people are acknowledging, let alone doing anything about. One doctor is investigating this problem and his written and spoken about it. (I wonder whether she does public speaking? Wouldn’t it be great to have someone like her talk here?)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/b0ea9126-eb50-11e7-9f92-10…
So the detrimental and, in some ways, self-sabotaging culture of production in academia is a thing that makes me angry in one way. The responses to this sort of thing make me angry in another way. I read the responses to the article you posted (I know, one should never read the comments), and it reminds me a lot of a Halloween a few years back when one university made a point of saying that counseling was available for students who were hurt or made uncomfortable by Halloween costumes. So much negative public response came out of that from people saying that these “kids” were being “coddled” and were failing to learn how to deal with the real world. I can only assume that the complainers must think that once you grow up, you no longer have any negative feelings strong enough to want to talk through with someone; everything is sunshine and rainbows.
I was unfriended by a couple of Facebook friends around that time, and I think it was in response to a long post I wrote that basically boiled down to ‘How *dare* you tell people what is ok to be upset or troubled by? How *dare* you try to shame people and make them feel selfish or weak or indulgent for talking to a therapist, whose entire job is to listen to their clients talk about things that trouble them.’ I do not regret that post. One person who unfriended me even had experience working security at sci-fi/fantasy conventions. How can you work at events like that, with frequent non-consensual touching or other harassment of people in costumes, and *not* understand the trauma that can result from social interactions that involve costumes? It shows an incredible lack of self-awareness on her part to not connect those things.
Anyway, long story short, I feel so frustrated by the need for something like this ‘cry closet’ to exist. I am similarly frustrated that so few people in a position of responsibility want to acknowledge the structural issues that give rise to that need. I am also angry with the people outside the situation who attack any show of humanity and vulnerability as indicative of some kind of inability to function in everyday life. Must be nice to be so perfect.
Thinking about a little more as I reread what I wrote, I guess I also regret the normalization of preventable dysfunction that this represents. It’s sort of a treatment of the symptoms instead of the causes. Instead of making counseling and mental health treatment more available and *acceptable*, we can try to pretend that we just need ten minutes alone to decompress and cry and then everything’s ok again. When I was in undergrad, I had clinically significant anxiety and depression. I laughed it off. Ha ha, look how neurotic I am, I guess I’m a real college student now! Feeling like this is stuff everybody deals with and manages on their own makes you even less likely to realize that you might really need some help managing things.
Apologies for the lengthy response. There’s just so much stuff tied into this article that doesn’t have the awareness or attention it deserves. It’s important to me to do my own little something about that.
https://www.insidehighered.com/…/cry-closet-installed-final…
---
Maybe this is not the kind of response you’re expecting, but it does give me a place to talk about something that personal experience has made important to me. Sorry if that’s at all inappropriate.
The need for this sort of thing (and there is a need) makes me angry. It’s symptomatic of a real, structural problem in the way academia and higher education works. It is not coincidental that the higher rate of mental illness rates among grad students is statistically significant. You know it’s been a problem for me. It’s certainly a problem for my partner. And a friend of mine working on a doctorate in psychology told me that, despite the fact that these are psychologists and they *know* the expectation structure of academia is not conducive to people doing their best, most efficient work, they *do it anyway* because that’s just how academia is done.
I know it’s worse for med students. When I found a book in our collection that was donated to us in memory of a former student, I looked around for information on him. It turned out he had committed suicide. That led me to reading about how frequent suicides of med students and doctors is; it is a non-trivial problem that it seems like few people are acknowledging, let alone doing anything about. One doctor is investigating this problem and his written and spoken about it. (I wonder whether she does public speaking? Wouldn’t it be great to have someone like her talk here?)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/b0ea9126-eb50-11e7-9f92-10…
So the detrimental and, in some ways, self-sabotaging culture of production in academia is a thing that makes me angry in one way. The responses to this sort of thing make me angry in another way. I read the responses to the article you posted (I know, one should never read the comments), and it reminds me a lot of a Halloween a few years back when one university made a point of saying that counseling was available for students who were hurt or made uncomfortable by Halloween costumes. So much negative public response came out of that from people saying that these “kids” were being “coddled” and were failing to learn how to deal with the real world. I can only assume that the complainers must think that once you grow up, you no longer have any negative feelings strong enough to want to talk through with someone; everything is sunshine and rainbows.
I was unfriended by a couple of Facebook friends around that time, and I think it was in response to a long post I wrote that basically boiled down to ‘How *dare* you tell people what is ok to be upset or troubled by? How *dare* you try to shame people and make them feel selfish or weak or indulgent for talking to a therapist, whose entire job is to listen to their clients talk about things that trouble them.’ I do not regret that post. One person who unfriended me even had experience working security at sci-fi/fantasy conventions. How can you work at events like that, with frequent non-consensual touching or other harassment of people in costumes, and *not* understand the trauma that can result from social interactions that involve costumes? It shows an incredible lack of self-awareness on her part to not connect those things.
Anyway, long story short, I feel so frustrated by the need for something like this ‘cry closet’ to exist. I am similarly frustrated that so few people in a position of responsibility want to acknowledge the structural issues that give rise to that need. I am also angry with the people outside the situation who attack any show of humanity and vulnerability as indicative of some kind of inability to function in everyday life. Must be nice to be so perfect.
Thinking about a little more as I reread what I wrote, I guess I also regret the normalization of preventable dysfunction that this represents. It’s sort of a treatment of the symptoms instead of the causes. Instead of making counseling and mental health treatment more available and *acceptable*, we can try to pretend that we just need ten minutes alone to decompress and cry and then everything’s ok again. When I was in undergrad, I had clinically significant anxiety and depression. I laughed it off. Ha ha, look how neurotic I am, I guess I’m a real college student now! Feeling like this is stuff everybody deals with and manages on their own makes you even less likely to realize that you might really need some help managing things.
Apologies for the lengthy response. There’s just so much stuff tied into this article that doesn’t have the awareness or attention it deserves. It’s important to me to do my own little something about that.
