My Story as a Disabled Student at the University of Washington School of Public Health — Discrimination, Negligence, Lack of Accountability, That Drove Me to the Absolute Edge
Essay Four of Ten in the “Mad at/in Public Health Education” Essay Collection
Note: This essay was published on July 24, 2024, and some edits were made on July 25, 2024 and July 27–28, 2024 to fix typos because this essay was originally written in one night. I also added a few items on these days and July 29, 2024 for self-protection from retaliation. Content warnings: academic harm, depression, suicide. The essay is a 30-minute read and the more serious issues are towards the end but require explanation for how we got there. Essay Five pushes back on the “disgruntled disabled person stereotype” and shares the internal department interview that the school refused to publish. Essays Six to Eight will describe some of the structural and policy changes that need to occur at the NIH / AHRQ levels (Essay Six), university (Essay Seven), and PhD and fellowship program (Essay Eight) levels to prevent these sort of experiences from happening to disabled trainees. These essays will be written, finished, and published later in August or September 2024 or later in the year as I have time and energy. I also wrote an essay entitled —“What Healing Looks Like — Resting, Medications, Therapy & Transitioning Gradually Back to Life”—to share my healing journey and offer some words to other disabled people and those who reached out with support.
Choosing My Truth and Healing
There comes a time in your life when you have to choose your own healing — and this early morning, a few hours after midnight, is that time for me.
Many practical reasons exist for why it makes sense for me to go public now with my experiences in the Department of Health Systems and Population Health at the University of Washington School of Public Health. First, I have already started to do so on social media over the last week, in a more unplanned and messy way. I have since archived most content and am consolidating it into this essay series, because I communicate better in writing. Second, since I have now brought in multiple parties into this situation, I am going to have to tell my story multiple times, and I prefer to share here. Third, I am now appealing to a number of different audiences and individuals outside of this school community, and if I only tell my story privately, other versions of my story may spread. And fourth, there are many people who have now expressed that they will try to support the changes I want, and giving them more information may be helpful.
Having stated all those reasons, however, I am ultimately doing this for me — to heal and move on. Because there are multiple things that I want to move onto in my life, and so although this is one of the scarier things I have done in my day, here we go! This story is complex, at times messy, but true. I acknowledge there are multiple truths in this world, and this is mine…
This is my story as an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality T32 fellow and PhD student in the Department of Health Systems and Population Health at the University of Washington School of Public Health from September 2022 to spring 2024. My name is Dielle Lundberg. I am disabled and neurodivergent, transfeminine, white, and I have been very open about my disabilities from the point of applying to come here. While I am still in training and am a student, my work on structural ableism has been widely recognized. Here are just a few examples — first-author paper, recent presentation, and upcoming presentation, and I share that solely to provide credibility for myself for those who need that to believe me.
Noticing There Was a Problem
I am not going to narrate the whole timeline and story of how I realized that there were significant problems both in the Department of Health Systems and Population Health and the University of Washington School of Public Health because this essay would get way too long.
So I am going to start with the smaller issues to set the stage for my story.
There are a couple points I want to raise. First, I believe there have been many instances of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation that have occurred in the department over many years and are open secrets. This has created an organizational culture of fear and lack of accountability. Second and perhaps more importantly, there is a huge lack of programmatic structure and policy to create the sort of environments that supports minoritized students such as disabled and neurodivergent students and prevent these sort of experiences from happening or from resolving if they do happen. These issues are most prominent in the PhD program but also exist at the department and school levels in various ways. This lack of structure and policy has been the area that I have been most focused on resolving personally. I know many disabled students around the country, and while there are issues everywhere, there are unique issues here.
In the case of this department’s PhD program, there were many issues that from my analysis fell well below what any School of Public Health should offer (let alone one a highly ranked school like the University of Washington). I also believe they differ from what was being reported on federal progress reports. Here are just a few of the things over 1.5 years:
- The PhD Program Director (henceforth abbreviated as PD) failed to proof the preliminary exam, which is a very important exam for PhD students we spend months preparing for, resulting in a large portion of it not being completable. While that may sound innocuous, it caused a huge amount of stress and feelings of imposter syndrome for students who did not have the audacity to guess no one had proofed the exam.
- The PhD lounge for the program was removed, despite this being a possible violation of the union agreement which requires a space for PhD students to work so we have a space to gather and study, such that we do not experience harassment or discrimination in another space.
- Frequent microaggressions from the PD reported by students
- Widespread favoritism from the PD reported by students
- Inability for PD to receive feedback without often having disproportionate and harmful reactions
- Lack of 1:1 meetings and check-ins from the PD and other fellowship leaders beyond an initial orientation for around 9 months
- Lack of any programming for the T32 until I threatened to leave
- An important second year project that was not assigned for over a quarter because the PD had not taken the time to plan it and resolve the many issues that had occurred with it each year previously
- Courses where we were talking about serious and traumatic issues with little awareness that there were people who have experienced those issues in the room and using trauma-informed practices
- Constant nonresponsiveness or nontimely responsiveness to emails on issues that were critical for students to plan their course schedules, get reimbursement for funds, and many other professional and life issues
- Insufficient to no hidden curriculum programming or any content in the early months of the program discussing how minoritized students can problem-solve issues in academia to overcome the very large number of known obstacles in health sciences (and assumptions that everybody has access to data coming in the first quarter of program)
- No or very limited explanation about how to report issues of discrimination and harassment and how to provide feedback to the PD and program leadership in an actionable way (beyond handbook)
- Lack of racialized and ethnic diversity in the teaching staff for the core courses, despite a large publicly stated focus on equity and racism
- Courses with little structure or syllabi (while there were some good courses, there were also some that were complete free-for-alls)
- Insufficient mechanisms for surveying student experiences and monitoring and evaluating program quality improvement / outcomes
I could go on, but I share all of these issues just to set the stage for the issues that occurred next. I want to highlight that I chose this program and this T32 fellowship over other places where I was admitted (and had better funding) because the PD heavily recruited me here and said it would be a good place for disabled students. Each of these small issues on their own is one thing, but put together, they created a climate of chronic stress that disproportionately impacted disabled and neurodivergent students, first-generation students, parents, and other minoritized student groups.
On the federal T32 fellowship, students get paid around $28,000 per year, so students are often working on the side on top of being full-time students and doing required research. A major goal of the federal government (NIH and AHRQ) is to get minoritized scientists including disabled and neurodivergent trainees trained effectively to become health scientists because we are often very well-equipped to respond to our specific communities’ health needs. Chronic stress that does nothing for learning is completely counterproductive to these goals and does nothing to build resilience or hard work ethic. Almost all of the students already have those things coming into the program and work way more than 40 hours per week already. So all this does it affect retention and contribute to inequity.
I share all of this largely to set the scene for my story…
Realizing the Problem Was Serious
By winter and spring of my first year as a PhD student and T32 fellow (late 2022 and early 2023), it was clear there was a general chaos in the PhD program. I was trying hard to remain positive though and to maintain a positive relationship with the PD who I knew I would need a letter of recommendation for if I were to apply for a fellowship in the future.
There were multiple specific issues that occurred for me, but I am only going to share one (one I have previously shared with the university administration) because I do not want to have to rehash them all.
I was taking a course, and as a disabled student, I am required to fill out a form with professors for some of my approved disability accommodations. One of my accommodations is that I can miss class occasionally because I have chronic pain and difficulty walking and it can be challenging for me to physically get to class. (I have no problem making up the material and am a good student.) However, when I was filling out the form, the professor told me something to the effect of “are you sure you’re not just going to take absences whenever you feel like it?” They then made several comments to me implying I was lazy. While I was annoyed by this, I ignored it. However, they then made a repeated pattern of comments throughout the quarter, even going so far as to imply that I was plagiarizing my work. (I have many faults, but writing insufficient length is not one.) When I raised the issue to another professor, that professor said that others in the department were aware of this professor’s behavior and they were just an adult learner.
The larger issue for me here was not actually even the incident. The issue was that I wanted to report this specific issue in an actionable way, and I filled out the student concern form that the school provides to do that. However, I did not end up submitting it because of the well-known culture in the department that is one of retaliation and most of the faculty being close friends with one another and covering up for one another, including the PD who is friends with this faculty member and other powerful ones (and has not discussed this potential conflict with us and how to navigate it). The fact that this issue occurred and I did not feel comfortable reporting it, and the fact that other issues were occurring too made me realize that there was likely a serious problem here for me and others.
Disinterest in Working Together
Around that time, I decided to start working with the Dean’s Office to try to improve things at the school for disabled and neurodivergent students. I was on the Dean’s Advisory Council for Students, so we had built a relationship. I had a few meetings with the Dean’s Office that were very productive, and we started working together on programming. I felt excited about the idea of improving the school for and with disabled students.
At the same time, the PhD program continued to become more and more chaotic, to the point that it was becoming destabilizing and preventing me from doing this type of advocacy, while also still functioning as a PhD student. So—in the summer, I wrote a long letter (over 10 pages) to the PD in August 2023 about what needed to change in the program to make it more workable for minoritized students. The letter was highly actionable, and a large amount of time was put into it to ensure that it would be received favorably (e.g., highlighting existing strengths of the program).
When I presented the letter to the PD, she seemed extremely nervous and quite overwhelmed by the idea of someone giving her feedback of this nature, but nonetheless, I felt hopeful that things would be fixed now. So I went back to my scholarship and activities and tried to trust that it was going to be fixed now. I was also applying for an important fellowship that fall, and I still needed a letter from the PD to support it. While it would have made a lot of sense to include the PD on my fellowship due to overlapping research interests, because of the many above issues, she was not someone I wanted to work with. Nonetheless, I knew I probably needed to have the letter (which she gave to me and wrote a good letter).
Around a similar time as I received that letter in fall 2023, conversation erupted at the school about the crisis in Gaza and the role of public health professionals in responding to it. While this issue elicits a large number of reactions, among public health students at the University of Washington, a very common view is that this is a genocide and that public health has a role in responding to it. As someone who feels that this issue is connected to disability justice and has personally witnessed a bombing, it was an issue I felt passionate about, and it was one I advocated on in the school.
This advocacy had literally nothing to do with the issues in the program other than it was a very stressful time for many students, and it would have been nice to have anybody checking in on us ever. The increase in stress from this and other situations also meant I did not have time to meet with the PD about the feedback I gave in August, when she finally scheduled a meeting about it. While I was happy to meet, the way I wrote the feedback was specifically in such a way that she and other program leaders could act on it without occupying too much of me and other students’ limited time.
Around this time, she was absent for a few weeks, and the feedback was not forwarded (to my understanding) to the many relevant parties who should have received it, particularly given that she was going to be absent. Meanwhile, the chaos in the program increased to the point where I decided that given my journey with mental health challenges and addiction, the environment was becoming destabilizing and it did not seem like the program was serious at all about working to resolve this.
For me, the most core issue was that I needed to take a medical leave, and because of the way the federal fellowships are set-up, we only get a stipend of $28,000, which we then have to supplement with additional income to earn minimum wage. You are not eligible for Washington state paid medical leave because the stipend is not work so you do not quality. So at best, the paid medical leave you can get is the monthly stipend of ~$2000. However, to do that, it is at the discretion of the PD, and because of the many issues I had had with the PD by that point, I had concerns about going to her for something that was so critical to me and my life because I felt it was very likely she would hold that over me for a long time.
So on one fateful night in February, I wrote to the PD that I was likely going to be leaving the program because of the lack of support and structure for minoritized students. It was a short email, and she expressed surprise — to which I was astounded, because I had been talking about the issues in the program for quite a long time. This to me pointed to the fact that although I was at one time one of her favorite students, she talked to me more frequently while recruiting me then when I was a student. She also directly mentioned my failure to attend the meeting in the fall (which I had communicated was due to my health issues) as being a potential reason that changes and improvements in the program had not occurred.
Trusting, Trusting, Trusting
The weeks to come were a hard period in my life for multiple reasons that were not just related to the PhD program. While the program’s chronic stress was exacerbating some of my health challenges, I also just have intermittent disabilities that flare-up every few years. And so I was having a lot of mental and physical health issues and my health providers were saying that you need to urgently take a medical leave.
In the days after me sending that email informing the PD that I would likely be leaving, I was shocked to find that she immediately started sending a huge amount of emails to people in the program, and they were largely not focused on resolving things — but rather making a case for why things were okay or why if not okay they were other people’s faults. It became clear to me that she was scared that me leaving would hurt her professionally because it would show up to NIH / AHRQ via the fellowship.
I was not expecting this sort of response, and while I had been considering taking action at the school, I had been planning to take some time to do so. But it appeared that if I was going to act, I needed to act quickly, so I sent another long letter to the Department Chair and the Dean about my concerns in the program and asking for an investigation / audit.
The issues I flagged for investigation are now posted publicly here.
At first, it seemed that the Department Chair and the Dean were taking this seriously, though they did make two comments that concerned me. The first was they referenced my Palestine advocacy, which had nothing to do with this at all, as the situation long preceded the fall when I did that advocacy at the school. And even if that was a relevant issue, students have a right to have political beliefs and still receive equal opportunities. The second was that the Dean said that she thought that most of the things I was bringing forward were likely true of other programs in the school.
I did not know what to do with that… as the issues I was raising were not insignificant. They were issues like favoritism, perceptions of retaliation, inability to receive feedback, and lack of programming and structure. So I had several meetings where I shared some of my experience and had the understanding that the Dean and the Department Chair also met with other students and stakeholders in the program to get their input.
The things I was after in terms of changes to the program were all very specific programmatic and policy changes that were detailed at length. However, the Department Chair in meetings boiled down my requests to — so is the main thing you want a new PD? When I thought about this, the answer was yes, because clearly, the PD was the person responsible for this mess. And so I said yes, the thing I want is for the PD to be removed and for me to have someone I can work with in a more effective way and that should create an environment for the changes that I want. The Department Chair said that she would handle the situation from there, and so I logged off and went to deal with my health and other life issues.
Weeks went by with basically no communication.
Until finally, I received an email from the Chair and the PD with no explanation regarding what happened and why the PD was still the PD with the following apology — “we hear you and feel sympathy for your stressful experiences.” Not only is this an extremely insufficient apology for everything that had happened, it directly referenced my recent essay that I had published (the first one in this series that is all about chronic stress). Further, it is my belief the only reason I finally got a response from the Chair and PD is because I published that essay and started talking publicly.
The school also wanted me to go meet one-on-one with the PD with the Ombud, but I did not care to meet with the PD, because she has not taken accountability for any of the things she has done in running the program. I do not have a huge personal issue with the PD (beyond some differences on research approach, scholarly lens toward addiction which I view as a disability and do not approach via only a deficit lens, and most importantly the resulting issues that occurred from the way she handled all of this). However, to this day, if she did not have power over me, I would go meet with the Ombud to work it out with her. What I wanted was for her to do her job effectively, and I do not think that she is going to be able to do that based off my perception that she has not done this job well for a long time.
At this time, though, I had gotten my life sort of back on track at another institution, so I was trying to decide whether to risk derailing again.
I thought about it for a bit.
The Meeting That Caused Explosions
I decided to deal with this again after discussing the situation with my family and a few other mentors outside the university, who told me that what was happening did not seem okay. So I wrote to the Dean and met with her over Zoom. It was about an hour meeting (maybe a little longer).
The Dean said she was excited to connect with me about my concerns.
The meeting began in a very strange way, with the Dean sharing confidential information that was irrelevant to me and the meeting. In retrospect, I perceive that this was an attempt to build trust. As a neurodivergent person in a significant moment of stress, however, sharing this information was very overwhelming and confusing to me. I am someone who needs an agenda to function well in meetings, and so being inundated with random information made me feel very overwhelmed.
Moving on, we started talking about the situation, and the Dean explained the PD had been encouraged to step down after being told her impact on students but the PD had said that she was fine with the impact she was having and was going to be continuing in her role. I responded that this was not okay with me because the issues I had faced in the program which started as early as winter and spring 2023 stemmed from long-term leadership failures, and I did not see an ability for those to be changed particularly given the way this had been handled since February. The Dean then encouraged me to go after a different faculty member who had caused me an issue, to which I told her, I do not care about any specific faculty member. The only reason I care about the PD is because she still has power over my and others’ careers and my mental and physical health.
This is where things started to go downhill…
I had made very clear at multiple points to the administration that a very significant priority for me was protecting any student who had shared any information about their experiences of harm in the program from further harm. The Dean then told me that if I filed a formal complaint (which she said was necessary for meaningful action against the PD) about any experience that I had previously discussed with anyone in the school administration, all of my prior correspondence would be given to the PD. More than that, the names of any students who came forward would be given to the PD. The way she shared this statement was not in anyway in the spirit of “let me help you protect those students” (who I do no think I personally named in my emails or even know all the names of). Rather, it was packaged within a broader discussion of her not wanting me to file a complaint against the PD, for a number of reasons. While she stated some of these, she never told me that the PD was serving on the committee determining whether or not she would get another 5 years as Dean, but I had seen this online by then.
I had told the school administration early on in this process that I needed to communicate about serious / stressful issues in writing, because I do not process verbal information well especially when stressed. And so having a Zoom/in-person meeting is not always effective because I need time to process the information before I can respond to it in a meaningful way. This is something I have a formal documented disability accommodation for related to bipolar disorder, PTSD, and ADHD on file with the school.
In discussing this, the Dean told me that my disability accommodations do not apply outside of the classroom, because the ADA and other disability laws only cover the classroom. So — she said if I wanted to file a complaint against the PD, it meant that every correspondence I had related to the program could potentially be given to the PD (who I did not want reading my email) along with the names of anyone who came forward.
I am not someone who cries often, and if I do, it is almost always because of profound stress. I did start crying in the meeting, and I asked the Dean “what was I supposed to have done differently to resolve the harm that I experienced?” The administration had convinced me to go down the internal resolution route (which I agreed to based off the information they provided me on its benefits), because they said it would be much more efficient to achieving the goal of removing the PD and achieving the programmatic changes I really wanted, and now as a result of me sharing information via the internal resolution route, this prevented me from taking meaningful action. When I started crying, the Dean told me that the way I went about resolving this situation could not have been more correct — as I started at the Program Director in August, raised it to the Department Chair in February, and then followed-up to the Dean at the current meeting. That being said, despite me doing everything absolutely right, she said there was nothing further she could do to help me with the PD.
We ended the meeting discussing some minor policy changes within the program, such as the composition of the Academic Affairs Committee.
A central request for me through all of this was an assurance that I would not experience retaliation from the PD and other faculty in the department for coming forward. After pushing the Dean on this, the most she offered me was an email to the full school reminding folks of the non-retaliation policy, which I do not think has happened yet (but am not sure).
Spiraling After the Meeting
I was not okay after this meeting.
But what kept me going for a few hours after was the fact that what the Dean had said about the disability accommodations did not make sense, because it did not align with my understanding of disability rights law. So I decided to go the AHRQ website and read about the T32 in more detail.
This is what I found:
Which led me to this website:
Which led me to reading all about Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which covers students who are on federal fellowships and all of their activities related to the program inside and outside of the classroom.
I realized multiple things in this moment — what happened to me should not have happened, the school completely enabled it, and that there were likely policy failures within the school that had caused this for others too.
The Impact I Will Feel for the Rest of My Career
Once I realized what the Dean was saying about the disability accommodations was not true, my mental health really started to spiral, as she was one of the only people at the school I had still trusted:
Email to non-university colleague the day after meeting with the Dean:
“They don’t even seem to know what the disability-related laws they need to be observing are. And I have made clear to them at almost every step of this, I am very much not okay. And last night, after I met with the dean about this, I came the closest to wanting to kill myself in a very long time because the situation essentially appears to be that unacceptable things happened to me because I am disabled but there is nothing they can do about it because of the way they have mishandled everything, and it has literally made me feel so small, harmed, and just I can’t even function anymore. I literally feel like this program lured me here only to shove me into like the worst possible hell for my mental illness and addiction after promising me that this was the best place for me to be. I am implementing a mental health safety plan and am establishing new mental health services.”
Medical record note from health care provider in the days after:
“Having a hard time sleeping, has been awake 72 hours and was finally able to knock herself out with higher dose of lithium and also trazodone. Reached out to psychiatrist. Taking the right steps to deal with current mental and physical health concerns and got rx for Seroquel. Will start taking it tonight… Has chronic pain and long covid… Struggling to put sentences together and with comprehending things. Feels foggy… Had a very stressful occupational event.”
I have been through a lot of dark times in my life, and so this was not the absolute darkest moment of my life. But it was a very dark time. I stopped functioning much at all. I could not do anything and could barely sleep. I am not going to speak about my medical situation and what happened afterwards for several reasons, but it was horrible. It was not the original source of my health problems, but it was certainly not helping. And what made all of this so much worse was knowing that many people in the university administration were likely saying that I was the nuisance here.
On a personal level, I came into this public health PhD program because I wanted to become a leader in public health as a disabled and neurodivergent person to prevent harm for other people in my community, especially who have experienced psychiatrization and addiction. Many people at the school know that is my mission, and the Dean prior to all of this nominated me for an award to recognize it. However, as soon as I started standing up for myself, it was like I became disposable.
I did eventually file a formal complaint against the leaders of the T32 because I was able to find an issue that I had not previously discussed with the Dean. However, the way that my formal complaint is written was completely shaped by all of the above issues and discussions — and that is just completely unacceptable and dysfunctional on so many levels.
Rebuilding My Life
I slept (emotionally) for a long time after this. It is not accurate though to say that I slept physically because I have been unable to sleep, and getting my body to calm down and be okay has been a big undertaking. I have been through a lot of things in my life, so I know how to survive in challenging times — but this was rough.
I owe pretty much everything to a handful of people — friends, mentors, connections, and my family who despite not traveling much came out to Seattle this month solely to check-on my healing and try to support me.
After months of therapy, taking my medications, and doing all of the things that my medical team told me to do, I finally worked up the nerve to return to the University of Washington School of Public Health with my family. This was a very critical step in my healing from all of this. The healing has not been peaceful; there has been anger; and for me one of the things that has gotten me through has been humor (and at times dark humor).
I took a picture in the lobby of the Hans Rosling Center (the major building for the School of Public Health at the University of Washington funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) below:
I have a bit of a chaotic social media presence that is representative of my identity as an artist and creative person — and I often use social media as a means for my own mental health healing, for self-expression, and for communication to specific people I care about. This post fell in a long series of that I did over the weekend with my family about the Chihuly Museum in Seattle. I have a deep, many-year connection with Chihuly as an artist related to Chihuly’s journey with bipolar disorder. His art to me represents the idea of creating bright, beautiful things out of darkness.
That weekend with my family was a very positive weekend for me, and it gave me hope that maybe I could get things together again soon and that I could return to a place of being a productive activist and doing my work. Four days later, however, the PD wrote to the entire PhD program informing us she was going on vacation. While she does this sort of thing a lot, informing us that she is leaving us is not something she does very frequently, so this in itself was unusual. But her signature for the email however was quite striking to me. It read: “sending you all the sunshine.”
While that may seem like a small coincidence, in the context of everything going on behind the scenes and my perception that she was stalling a meeting with me about the formal complaint (that I had finally agreed to to try to move on from this), for me, there was no question it was intentional — particularly since Instagram is a platform I had not yet blocked her.
I have since blocked her there.
Note added on July 27–28, 2024: my connection with the sun as related to my journey with bipolar disorder, loss, and suicide is longstanding, so my use of this imagery moving forward is not going to be impacted in anyway by these events. Future use is not in reference to this. While some of my connection has been private, much of it also has not been. For example, on June 15 and May 31 (weeks before this), I posted on Instagram about the sunset as a metaphor for loss of two people in my life who passed away and depression. I added one of these posts to my Twitter at that time. This weekend, I also wrote publicly about how the sun is connected to my spirituality, religious background, healing, and cultural heritage and how the religious and cultural language in these posts directly referenced my religious faith, addiction recovery, and Irish Catholic heritage. I don’t talk about my religious faith much at public health institutions, as it is something I hold relatively privately and believe all are entitled to have and cherish.
The sunshine comment is ultimately beside the point, but it was the final issue that caused an explosion for me (an earlier one being my interview about my experiences in the department being censored) because for me it felt like a direct attack on my journey with addiction and healing by someone who researches that and has contributed a great deal of chaos to my life. I am on at least two papers with her that she has not met the criteria of authorship for yet that are fairly related to my lived experience of addiction and being trans, and she has refused to remove herself — in my perspective specifically and simply as an attempt to exert power over me.
What I Want from the School
Despite everything that has happened here, which I consider to be emotional abuse, discrimination, and negligence, the only things I have been consistently asking for from the school are below. And they still have not given me any of these things. My very basic demands are:
- New program leadership (new PD and student input on the committee governing the PhD program),
- Minimum wage funding ($42,000) for me and my classmates so that we have time to spend the 5–10 hours per week we often do managing the program chaos and trying to fix everything,
- Meaningful assurances that I and others will not be retaliated against by faculty in the department and school,
- An investigation and other processes to ensure things that happened in the program, department, and school around this get fixed.
If these things happen, I have consistently expressed willingness to continue to collaborate productively with the school. While I have also expressed willingness to continue to escalate the issue, I have also at every stage communicated a preference for collaboration. But now the school seems ready to make me out to be disgruntled for going public about these things. And the only reason I am going public is because I have been working on this for over a year and basically nothing has happened. And at this point, there has been a huge amount of harm for me and my life—and for my own healing and health, I need to put this behind me.
I am a neurodivergent person who likes to read, write, and do my art.
NIH / AHRQ / school — this has been a really horrible situation. I have given you and so many different folks so much productive ideas on how to fix it over a period of a year and a half. I have also given you many formal documents and time in meetings.
But I am done here (beyond finishing this essay collection which I hope to do later this year). This is what happened to me. Believe it if you want; don’t believe it if you don’t want.
This is my truth. And I needed to tell it. I am healing and moving on.
Dielle Lundberg
contact@diellelundberg.com
diellelundberg.com
Supplementary Content:
This content was added over the five days after publication of this essay, in an effort to respond to some questions and protect myself from retaliation.
Supplementary Point 1. Whistleblower Status
I have publicly identified as a whistleblower. I will also just say publicly here that I am not planning to take any legal actions in relation to the above experiences (unless it were to become somehow necessary for my self-protection, which I do not foresee). I remain hopeful that the school and other parties can reach a productive resolution on this. The only actions I am still considering would be related to patterns of conduct documented by numerous students and school policies if the school does not take meaningful action to prevent this from occurring again by early September.
Supplementary Point 2. On Intersectionality
As I try to move on from this experience and limit its further impacts on my life and career, something I wanted to note briefly is that my experiences as a disabled student and trainee documented above (that I believe warrant significant action from the NIH / AHRQ / UW) ultimately stem from many years of policies, programmatic, and other structural issues that failed to protect minoritized students in the way that a recipient of these funds should. My documentation of these issues stretches back in emails from the beginning of 2023.
There is also a second, entirely separate but for me more concerning issue (because it is the one I am worried about experiencing ongoing retaliation for). The way that the University of Washington administration handled my issues as a disabled student after I attempted to try to resolve them (and the changes in our relationship that emerged in Fall 2023 and Winter 2024) was unacceptable and not transparent in anyway and led to a lot of harm for me. Something I have been thinking about a lot is trying to understand whether the way I was treated was just an attempt to censor and prevent my peaceful and protected political speech related to my Catholic religious background and Irish Catholic culture heritage? Or was it because they found me difficult to work with as a transgender and queer person? As a woman? Or was it they didn’t like how I communicated as a neurodivergent person? Or was it because I am visibly disabled and have chronic fatigue and they knew that they could wear me out in meetings? That I have trauma related to sexual assault and a bombing and that I struggle to survive stressful conflicts? That I have dealt with addiction and mental illness? And these things could be used to discredit me?
The concept of intersectionality teaches us that the way exclusion and discrimination occurs, it is often a little bit of all these experiences and systems occurring at once that creates the impact that forces specific multiply marginalized people out or down. When it functions in that way, it can be very difficult for people who live at these intersections to capture and document enough of what is occurring to take action on it. At the same time, people who live in these intersections are deeply vital to the NIH / AHRQ’s mission and goals to improve health for marginalized communities, including disabled people. I am institutionally and legally protected as a result of what occurred here as a student and trainee trying my best (imperfectly) from any sort of discrimination and retaliation on the basis of disability, gender identity / expression / sex, sexual orientation, religious background, cultural heritage, and political expression.
Footnotes:
Short Link for Sharing This Essay
https://medium.com/p/27faddb968be
Note on Essay Collection Publication Timing
I made the decision to publish Essays Four and Five of my Mad at/in Public Health Education Essay Collection in July because I am trying to return to occupational activities in August. While most of my recovery has involved sleeping, therapy, taking my medications, and otherwise healing, an important part of my healing — discussed closely with my mental health team — is speaking publicly and being heard. This essay collection is just one expression of that, in one area of my life that I am trying to recover from. I have intentionally decided to publish these essays at this time as a means of hopefully leaving this chapter of my life behind, returning to my work and advocacy, and moving onto brighter things. Essays Six through Ten will be written, finished, and published in August or September 2024 or sometime later this year.
The Next Essay
The second half of this essay series, consolidating recommendations for resolving some of these issues, will be published in August, September, or beyond. The fifth essay –“Disgruntled: It Doesn’t Really Matter What Your Tone Is As a Disabled and/or Neurodivergent Person in Public Health and Health Sciences” — is now available. There are 10 essays in this collection, covering distinct issues that are timely for exploration in public health education.
Essay Collection Goal
My purpose in launching this essay collection is to explore issues of access in public health and health care education for mad, disabled, and/or neurodivergent students and ideas to spur change in praxis and improve the experiences of students, staff, and faculty in these fields. I hope these essays will be generative, so I do hope folks will read, share, and discuss!
Essay Collection Disclaimer
All content expressed in this essay collection reflects my own views, perspectives and experiences and is not intended to reflect anyone else’s. Additionally, when discussing my own experiences, these essays solely reflect my own perceptions and memories of them.
About the Author
