When the Ivy League betrays you: Managing mental health at elite institutions of learning
I entered Harvard Law School in the fall of 2008. The economy was crashing, and with it, opportunities for law firm jobs. Sharks were out for blood.
I arrived depressed and in denial about my mother’s cancer, which was diagnosed a year prior. She had no health insurance when she got sick, and couldn’t afford any with cancer as a pre-existing condition. My abusive father refused to help. “Let her learn a lesson,” he scoffed, knowing that he could afford to pay for her treatment a hundred times over.
I had assured my mom that my dad would help her. When he refused, something inside me broke. My brain couldn’t process the betrayal and so I buried it. Mom hustled her way into chemotherapy but didn’t complete it. Instead, she fell for a quack who believed that vitamin baths cured cancer.
Around Thanksgiving of my 1L year I learned that my mom had shrunk to a ghastly 90 pounds. I flew home to California to find that her cancer had metastasized to her lymph nodes. I was 24 years old and emotionally unequipped. In a panic, I returned to HLS to finish the last few classes before winter break.
During the interim, I went to Harvard Health Services for an emergency session with a psychiatrist. My anxiety over my mom’s health was skyrocketing and I had severe insomnia. It was my first time asking for mental health medication.
The Harvard doctor was deplorable. He shamed me for disclosing that I self-medicated with coffee and cigarettes, and then dismissively suggested Benadryl. Having suffered from severe stress allergies since childhood, I replied that if antihistamines did the trick, I wouldn’t be sitting in front of him. That my mother was dying seemed shockingly irrelevant to him.
According to him, the fact that I was attending Harvard Law precluded any real dysfunction. He patronized me like I was an addict manipulating him for a fix and sent me on my way with three measly pills and zero follow up. The message was clear: At Harvard, I was not allowed to not be OK.
My mom died less than a month later on December 25, 2008. One afternoon before her death, I was allowed out of dad’s house to go see her and found her in bed. Feeling worn down, I curled up as her little spoon and we took a nap. It was the last peaceful moment we had together. I woke up terrified that my dad would find out. The next day she went into the hospital for a gastrointestinal obstruction, and never made it home again.
It felt perverse to grieve for my mom in front of my dad, and so I fled the day after the funeral. First semester exams were scheduled for early January and I had decided to plow through. My dad later said that leaving him after my mom’s funeral meant that I didn’t love her.
Someone from the school sent flowers to my apartment. No one offered counseling. My options were to take a semester off with my dad, or continue on as planned. I postponed two exams by a week, and took the others in zombified delirium with the rest of my section.
My back gave out during the prep period and I remained in the fetal position on my futon for days. I was close to pissing myself when two friends arrived, handed me a shot of vodka, grasped me by my armpits and pulled me upright. I almost blacked out from the pain, but at least I made it to the bathroom. I took (and passed!) an exam shortly thereafter while high on muscle relaxants.
I only graduated from Harvard because I developed ride or die friendships from the start. I learned young that I needed friends in order to survive. Losing my mom was a living nightmare. My friends kept me afloat when the school would have let me drown.
When the rest of the student body left for vacation, I remained alone at Harvard for the remaining two tests, isolated by grief and several feet of snow. I bombed the easiest exam because I hadn’t slept in days. That one bad grade would haunt me. I lost so much weight that my dad complimented me on my figure.
My mom’s death knocked me out of the rat race, and I could feel people take me less seriously. Instead of burying myself in work, I quit going to class. I’d always found solace in school before, so this was devastating.
Despite the financial crash, HLS still functioned as a factory for churning out Big Law associates. I went on thirty interviews in three days, and had to recount my mom’s death in every one. The only callback I got was from a slimy partner who rubbed my shoulder. He invited me to an offer dinner where I was the only one with no offer. Thirty interviews, thirty rejections.
Back in Cambridge, I remember weeping to friends that I had nothing to look forward to. I wasn’t suicidal, but I was regularly drinking myself to sleep. Harvard’s unique opportunities and resources were too often marred by prestige-whoring, public shaming, and a student culture which consisted of drinking alone until passing out on a textbook. My friend in student government once went to the Dean of Students to ask why there was no student advising, and the Dean replied, “I don’t see the point.”
My circumstances were extreme, but mental health issues for students at HLS are extremely common. Above The Law recently published the results of a survey conducted at HLS, which showed a “grisly reality.” 25% of the HLS student body reported depression, an almost equal amount suffered from anxiety, and 20.5% said they experienced a heightened risk of suicide. 66% said they experienced new mental health issues while in law school. I wouldn’t be surprised if the numbers are higher, when taking into account the level of self-censorship they demand there.
I found my therapist in New York the summer after my mom died. She was there for me when I became fully estranged from my father early in my 3L year. I told him I wanted to become an academic, and he kicked me out of his life. My only regret was that I wasn’t ready to stand my ground earlier, when my mom was alive.
Since he’d paid for law school, however, my dad demanded a special invitation to graduation. I was bullied into agreeing for civility’s sake. I demanded that we not be left alone, yet within minutes of seeing me, he had me cornered and was verbally terrorizing me in the backyard of our family friends’ house. His attack was only thwarted when my friend dashed outside and put her body between his and mine.
Anticipating my dad’s temper, our hosts had invited their personal trainer to the house, and this buff guy was dispatched to distract him with a walk while I snuck away in a taxi. My dad kept everyone up raising hell until some absurd hour before flying away in the morning without attending the ceremony.
To his credit, he subsequently gave me financial freedom in what he calls a divorce. There are considerable perks to being a rich man’s property. That money allowed me to change career paths, continue therapy, and care for my mom’s mom, Grammy Angel.
Grammy’s health declined dramatically after I took (and passed!) the New York bar exam. In the first of many emergency visits, I flew to California after getting a call that Angel had broken her wrist. I arrived to find her bleeding profusely through her cast, having asked her neighbor to help her cut it off with a large knife. The social worker was threatening to call the cops. Grammy kept insisting that it was a minor scratch. I moved her into assisted living three days later.
Meanwhile, the transition to a PhD was rocky. The first time I applied I was rejected across the board. With no Plan B, I was scooped up by my undergraduate professors from Duke, two brilliant, loving women who are like family to me. They invited me to teach for a year while I reapplied.
The 2012–2013 academic year was a roller coaster. On my second try, I was accepted into the top programs in my field. It was masochistic of me to apply to Berkeley, because I knew that I couldn’t live near my dad, who was based in California. Princeton, on the other hand, was charmless and unforgiving, but provided an unmatchable combination of resources and training. Most importantly, it was a short train ride away from my home in New York.
That spring, Mike, the man I stayed with in California, died of cancer. Mike picked me up when my dad threw me out. He said, “He batters you, don’t ever go back.” He was thrilled that I was in therapy, and was rooting for Princeton. He died shortly before I got in, though not before telling my dad off when he showed up to the hospital uninvited. Mike was on my side.
I chose Princeton over Berkeley, the marriage of convenience over the star-crossed affair. When Grammy died at the end of July, 2013, my dad didn’t send flowers.
I started Princeton a month and a half later. I wanted to start fresh, but grief and trauma don’t work like that. I suffer from Complex PTSD, a disorder which develops from exposure to chronic abuse. It’s been described as a normal response to abnormal conditions, and develops in people who experience child abuse, domestic violence, internment camps, or prison. Symptoms include depression, anxiety, revictimization, somatization, hypervigilance, dissociation, and a fractured sense of self.
I began taking Wellbutrin, an anti-depressant, after law school. It gave me armor and flexibility. I was also prescribed anti-anxiety meds when I began making cross-country trips to the hospital again. The medications were precious tools for managing my illness.
I cried myself to sleep most nights my first year at Princeton as I grieved for my mom, grandma, and Mike. I instinctively knew better than to share my problems with my department, let alone with my advisor.
As impersonal as Princeton was, I was happy to be there. I still get giddy when I think of the archival work I accomplished, the interdisciplinary ties I explored, and the insightful, brilliant minds I learned from on a regular basis. It was the best education I’ve ever received, and I was paid for it.
My general exams were scheduled for May of my second year. I had three months to read over 300 books. It’s said that people with ADHD get help when they hit a wall, and this was mine. The thought of more medication put me into a shame spiral. It wasn’t until a friend confided in me that she’d been prescribed ADHD medication during her exams that I got the courage to do it too.
If that were all, I might still be at Princeton. Alas, my dad has an uncanny ability to destroy what I love. He acts as if I was put on earth by him, and for him. Like King Lear says to Cordelia, “Come, let’s away to prison. We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage.”
Just when exam prep began, the woman who had cared for my dad for four years moved out, and he turned his attention to me. He sent people I loved, as well as people I didn’t even know, to guilt me that his health was plummeting fast, and wouldn’t I feel terrible knowing that he’d died and I’d done nothing. I had a nervous breakdown while on jury duty a few weeks before exams. I should have postponed the test, but I had tunnel vision. My mom had died before finishing her doctorate, a fact which pleased my dad. It felt like it was now or never. I had to take this test before he died.
My advisor barely checked in. His books are enormous, but his emails read like cheap telegrams. He assumed, like that Harvard doctor, that a Harvard Law degree meant that I was fully functional. As if you can know a person by reading their resume. Still, my eccentricities amused him, and he seemed to enjoy showing me off.
He was obsessed with displays of power, both in his research and in his pedagogy. He would try to play me and my co-advisee off each other, complimenting her on things I lacked and vice-versa. She and I were fast friends, however, and took pride in his inability to drive a wedge between us.
By the end, I was burned out from my dad’s threats and panicked at the amount of material I was responsible for. The exam consisted of a week-long written portion followed by a three hour oral examination by the three professors on my committee. The written portion was brutal, but the oral exam was worse. I showed up wild-eyed and over-caffeinated and gave a comically bad performance. It visibly shook my advisor to see me give so few fucks. The two female professors in the room seemed glad that I survived.
I passed! Barely, but whatever.
The relief didn’t last long. I received an email from my advisor which attempted niceties and I immediately burst into tears. When a man who never relaxes suggests that you take a breather, it means he’s given up. I felt like a dog that he was preparing to put down.
I wasn’t ready to give up that easily. I sent my advisor an email disclosing my situation with my family and how it affected my health. He didn’t reply. Instead, I was summoned to Princeton to meet with my department’s director of graduate studies (DGS).
The DGS scheduled our meeting for late on the Friday afternoon before Memorial Day weekend. He said that my advisor liked me, but no longer supported me. I was going to be kicked out the back door on a technicality in a secretive faculty vote. Monday was a holiday, and the vote was on Tuesday.
As I began to make my case, he responded that I “made no sense” to him. This is the same department whose aging male professors claimed softball as a man’s sport. Their range of human experience is slim.
He said he’d never encountered someone whose research was strong despite the gaps in her disciplinary knowledge. I explained that abuse creates chaos and that those gaps represent stolen time. I offered to jump through hoops. I’d already blocked my dad’s number. The thought of losing my dream because my dad had gotten in my head once again was unbearable.
I suggested he read my email aloud at the vote. The DGS responded coldly that he was happy to provide bullet points. My stomach sunk. If only I were a man on my second divorce, I might have found a more sympathetic audience.
I wonder what his bullet points were. Dad abusive. Mom dead. Grandma dead. Chronic trauma disorder. No prior complaints. PASSED EXAM ANYWAY.
The DGS suggested rallying my other professors to the cause while glossing over the fact that he’d waited til the heavy-hitters left town before ambushing me. When I emailed them about what was happening, they were shocked. No one had told them. They wrote letters of support but it didn’t help.
My advisor avoided facing me until right before the vote. I think he wanted me to fall apart, which just motivated me to fight harder. He wouldn’t be the first person to get jealous that I was more anxious about my father’s bullshit than I had ever been about pleasing him. Get in line.
He could barely look at me, yet expected me to comfort him. His idea of relating to me was confiding that he hadn’t been admitted to Harvard Law. Cool story, bro. Again I heard that he liked me. It felt like a career death sentence. People who pride themselves on appearing objective are so terrified of showing bias that they overcorrect (see, eg., James Comey).
He said, “Don’t you agree that it’s best for you to leave.” I responded, “No, if it were my choice, I’d stay, but you’re taking my choice away.” He was like Professor Higgins, if Higgins had been stupid enough to throw Eliza out after the Ascot races. His trophy was dented and he was trading me in.
He must have rehearsed with the DGS because they used many of the same words, perhaps the same bullet points. He said I couldn’t possibly teach. I replied, “Tell that to Duke.” Let’s be real, if mental illness precluded people from teaching, universities would be empty.
My favorite excuse was that he could no longer write the kind of letter I’d need in three years to be competitive on the job market. I later wrote him half-jokingly: “You won’t give me a letter in three years, but what about now?”
He ended with a smirk while throwing his colleague under the bus: “At least I’m being honest with you.” I thought of that line when the DGS later offered me a character reference.
I was voted out that afternoon. Some junior faculty who were in attendance confided in friends that the whole business felt dirty. And the department miscalculated if they thought I’d stay quiet.
My privilege allowed me to walk away from that toxic place. Imagine if I were dependent on a student visa, or financially insecure, like 99% of the grad students in the country. I wrote to our department student mailing list explaining what had happened in the hopes that they’d use my story as leverage with the administration.
I refused to be shamed for doing poorly on an exam, especially one that I passed.
The grown man throwing a cruel tantrum at the expense of a sick, grieving student’s career should be ashamed. As a lawyer, I knew that it was illegal under the Americans with Disabilities Act to fire someone for disclosing mental illness, but grad students barely have rights, and I had zero interest in appealing.
The purge made students feel insecure about their spot in the program. I joke that the women and minorities naturally empathized, while the white dudes saw a Harvard Law grad get kicked out after passing her exams, and it got to them too. My co-advisee defected to a new advisor.
I went to sleep for a few months, before pulling myself back up to go find and build a new dream. Like a vampire, my dad miraculously recovered, and took off on a extensive vacation abroad.
Princeton has a habit of sweeping away students who disclose mental illness, and they’re not alone. It’s a disgraceful thing for any school to do, especially when students are experiencing trauma of any kind. How many sick students avoid getting help because they don’t want to get kicked out of school? People with mental illness need medical care, not discrimination.
As for graduate students, given the precariousness of academia nowadays, developing an anxiety disorder is basically a rite of passage. Treating mentally ill students like they’re broken-down robots — punishing them for not being perfect, i.e. human — perpetuates discriminatory practices and exacerbates mental health crises on campus.
