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FEBRUARY 19, 2020 SEVENTH WEEK VOL. 132, ISSUE 16

SPECIAL ISSUE: MENTAL HEALTH OP-ED: Living With Anxiety and Working for UChicago

EDITORIAL: For Truly Effective Health Care, Listen to Students

GREY CITY: The Case for (and Against) Cultural Centers

SPORTS: Confronting the Stigma

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THE CHICAGO MAROON — FEBRUARY 19, 2020

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Cover illustration by Jessica Xia.

Nearly Two Years Later, Charles Thomas’s Family Battles Case

By JACK CRUZ-ALVAREZ Deputy News Editor Charles Thomas’s mother remembers feeling a bullet under her son’s skin the last time she hugged him.

“If he had been Tased, he wouldn’t still have a bullet lodged in his shoulder and his back,” his mother Kathy said in a recent interview. “They never removed the bullet.

It’s still there.”

In April 2018, Thomas, a fourth-year student at the time, was shot by a University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) officer during a mental health episode his parents believe was brought on by his bipolar disorder. Thomas was found in an alleyway in Hyde Park that night wielding a metal pole and smashing windows. Footage from the officer’s body camera shows Thomas running in the officer’s direction before he was shot.

Thomas was placed under house arrest and charged with three felony counts of aggravated assault of a police officer and five felony counts of criminal damage of property. However, after escaping house arrest during another mental health episode and going missing for two weeks last September, he was eventually found in an Indiana cornfield, and has since been in Cook County Jail awaiting trial. He is now also facing an escape charge.

Thomas’s ongoing case has caused financial and emotional hardship for his parents, upheaving their lives, they say. Nearly two years after their son’s arrest, they’re wearily awaiting a resolution to the case.

“I’m beginning to think that there is going to be an endpoint to this at some point,” his father, Wendell Thomas, said. “It’s got to be close.”

The hug Thomas’s mother remembers so vividly happened last summer, she said, the last time she saw him before he went to jail. Kathy and Wendell were living in California at the time, and they visited Charles periodically while he was under house arrest in Chicago.

They are both now in the process of relocating to Chicago, in order to be closer to their son.

“I just need to be available to help deal with Charles, and I can’t do all that from California,” his mother said.

Kathy, a third grade teacher, plans to retire by the end of the school year. She said she’s already taken two leaves of absence because of her son’s case, and her time away has affected her students’ learning. Wendell, a nurse, is already in Chicago looking for a new position.

“I’m willing to have my nursing license be transferred from California to [Illinois] or maybe work in VA (Veterans Affairs) hospitals where my California license can be used…. I’d be willing to do that,” Wendell said. “I’m willing to do anything for my son.”

Besides relocation, Thomas’s parents have faced other sources of stress over the course of his case.

“Setting up apartments [in Chicago], tracking down lawyers, it’s just constant,” Kathy said. “I don’t think I’ve had a real relaxing day since April of 2018 because it’s always in the back of my mind.”

Another source of stress they face is concern for the quality of mental health treatment Charles is receiving in jail. Kathy said the jail does a good job at making sure inmates take their medication and provides group therapy sessions but fails to provide fresh fruits or vegetables in meals or opportunities for exercise.

“A huge thing with bipolar disorder is, in addition to medication, you need to be eating well, you need to be exercising well to keep everything functioning correctly,” Kathy said. “It’s not the ideal situation.”

The condition runs on Kathy’s side of the family and she herself has been diagnosed, she said.

Her concern for Thomas’s mental health has persisted since he was a college student.

At that time, “I was worried, with him, that it would be like it was with me, which would be anxiety and depression,” Kathy said. “So I was watching more for that and talked to him and said, ‘Hey, if you feel any symptoms coming on, you can call us, you can go to student services. Get help, it’s okay.’”

Thomas did reach out to the Student Counseling Service (SCS) before April after what he thought was an anxiety attack, but according to his father he was told they would not be able to treat him on campus and gave him a list of off-campus resources he could try.

His parents did not know about the anxiety attack until some of his friends told them after he had been hospitalized after the shooting, they say.

“Sometimes it’s hard to tell your mom stuff,” Kathy said. “I kind of wish he would have told me, because I would’ve been on the first plane out there and I would’ve flown him home just to check out what’s going on.”

At an event on campus last quarter organized UChicago United, a group composed of different multicultural student organizations on campus, Wendell criticized SCS for not providing on-campus treatment for his son and UCPD for how they dealt with his mental health episode.

“Charles Soji is our only child and has been the greatest joy in our lives,” Wendell read from this statement. “He is not a criminal. He is a kind, intelligent, caring young man who happens to have a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. He needs care, not jail.”

SCS declined to comment, citing “privacy laws and standards of confidentiality.”

Kathy has also expressed criticism of how the situation was handled by the University and the police. She said the University didn’t reveal everything that had happened in her initial call from them and that she only began to hear the full story while she was travelling to Chicago. In the hospital, she said, she found her son handcuffed to his bed and was only allowed to visit him once very briefly. She also criticized the UCPD officers for not carrying Tasers and for pointing a gun at Thomas during his episode, which she believes only escalated the situation.

In a statement to The Maroon, UCPD said “supporting the safety and well-being of those on campus and within UCPD’s extended patrol area is of paramount importance for all members of the UCPD.” The statement noted that all UCPD officers are required to receive 40 hours of Crisis Intervention Training, training for police responding to incidents involving people with mental health disorders, a commitment “unusual for police departments nationwide.”

UCPD said officers began carrying Tasers last August as part of an update to their safety policies and procedures.

Now, Kathy and Wendell continue to

anxiously wait. They were told in 2018 that their son’s case would be settled by late summer, but a series of delays have held it up. Thomas’s next hearing is on March 4, less than a month away from the two-year anniversary of his arrest. Kathy and Wendell say the delays in the case have made dealing with it much more difficult.

“It’s like a mudslide that moves down the hill slowly,” Wendell said. “It just doesn’t ever pick up steam. It just keeps rolling and rolling and rolling. We’re hoping for some finality at some point.”

Wendell believes had the case been resolved in the expected timeframe, their son’s escape from house arrest in September and his subsequent imprisonment could have been avoided.

“We were living [in Chicago], but we thought it would be resolved within six months. We had a lease on an apartment unit, but that lease ran out so we had him move in with a roommate that we were able to find…. I just wish I could have been here,” Wendell said.

UChicago United began a #DropTheCharges campaign as part of their larger #CareNotCops campaign last December in an attempt to pressure University administrators to get Thomas’s charges dropped.

Kathy said whether or not the University can contribute to dropping the charges, she believes there are still other ways administrators can show support for her son.

“What would go a long way is for President Zimmer and Dean Rasmussen to write letters of support for Charles to the judge or the prosecutors, which we’ve asked for and basically they just won’t,” Kathy said.

If Thomas can get released soon, his parents hope to take him back to California to be with family and support him in his desire to return to school and finish his college degree. While a fourth-year student at UChicago, Charles had been planning to spend a year working on archaeological digs after graduation, before eventually pursuing a doctorate, the Chicago Tribune reported.

However, when Thomas’s move home may happen becomes more uncertain as the case progresses.

“It’s just been a constant nightmare,” Kathy said.

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As Demand for Counseling Services Increase, More Students Referred to Off-Campus Providers

By EMMA DYER Editor-in-Chief-elect Faced with rising demand for mental health services, the University has relied more heavily on outside referrals, increasingly directing students to off-campus therapists and health-care providers, minutes of the faculty senate from 2018 recently obtained by The Maroon show.

As the number of students using the Student Counseling Service (SCS) has increased, so has the number of students being referred off-campus. The number of students referred to outside providers exceeded 700 students in 2018, former director of SCS David Albert said at an April 2018 faculty senate meeting.

“Lately, it has been necessary to increase the percentage of students being referred out, in order to maintain equilibrium,” Albert told attendees of the meeting, which included University administrators such as President Robert Zimmer.

The statistics offer a glimpse into how the branch of the University tasked with providing mental health care to students is responding to evolving student demands on campus.

More referrals amid increasing demand Over the past decade, demand for SCS services has increased. In 2008, 16 percent of students made use of SCS services, and in 2017, that number increased to 21 percent, Albert said at the April 2018 faculty senate meeting. Albert’s successor, Meeta Kumar, recently told The Maroon that in 2018, a slightly greater percent of students used SCS services—21.5 percent.

At the same time, referrals by SCS to off-campus providers have increased as well. “One effect of increased demand is a substantial year-to-year increase in referrals to outside providers,” Albert said at the meeting. The percentage of students being referred out at intake increased from 26 percent in 2016 to 38 percent in 2017, he said.

The University declined to provide more recent referral rates. Spokesperson Jeremy Manier said, “The University does not release year-to-year figures for the SCS referral rate, which can fluctuate in

ways that do not reliably inform administrative planning.”

At the faculty senate meeting, Albert attributed the jump in outside referrals to SCS’s decision to not have a waitlist, despite increased demand for counseling services.

If SCS wanted to continue not having a waitlist, Albert said, “this will become more difficult unless the supply keeps pace, particularly in an environment of rising demand.”

Albert also noted that individual psychotherapy sessions offered in-house have reduced. “Several years ago, SCS was able to offer students eight to 10 treatment sessions, but this has declined to six to eight sessions,” he said.

Assistant Vice President for Student Services Mario Polizzi, who consulted with Albert before the 2018 meeting, told The Maroon in a recent interview that these numbers on treatment sessions represented the average number of sessions for students during a single treatment. Polizzi said that SCS does not cap the number of sessions a student may receive from SCS and that students may go through stints of in-house sessions multiple times throughout their time at UChicago.

Kumar told The Maroon in the same interview that she believes that statistics around referral rates should be viewed in the context of changing needs of students.

“We are seeing a greater need for more long-term care,” Kumar said. Students across the country are coming into college having already identified chronic mental health conditions, and more students have had experience with therapy prior to college, she said, and this means more students go to SCS seeking long-term care from external providers.

Other methods Student Counseling is pursuing At the April 2018 faculty senate meeting, Albert also indicated routes he felt SCS should take to better support students—routes the University has pursued recently.

In response to one professor’s concerns about the increasing anxieties felt

by students and barriers to seeking mental health treatment, Albert suggested that hiring a case manager—a staff member to help students navigate the referral process—could help “mitigate some of the risk associated with referrals.”

In the 2018–19 school year, SCS hired two professional case managers who are also licensed clinical social workers. Case managers assist students by connecting them to providers that accept their insurance and will call insurance companies with students to help break down costs.

Kumar told The Maroon that hiring case managers has allowed SCS to expedite the referral process for students who are looking for long-term care.

In addition to case managers, SCS has added new positions including three clinical psychologists, one associate director for diversity and inclusion, one psychiatric nurse, a postdoctoral psychology trainee, and one administrative staffer.

The associate director for diversity and inclusion is also a psychologist who will spend time doing therapy and the psychiatric nurse will provide medication management by supporting and monitoring students as they are prescribed new medications.

Albert also stressed efforts to increase usage of SCS. He said that although around 45 percent of students indicate that they would like to make use of student counseling, only about half that number make use of SCS offerings. He attributed the gap, in part, to the “major and intractable problem” of students’ choice to live off campus, where isolation can exacerbate existing issues. Living off campus, he said, “renders students far less visible.”

In the six months since she became director, Kumar has taken steps to address some of the most prominent student complaints, including wait times, accessibility, and increased staff. In the past two years, SCS has responded to student concerns by hiring staff, opening two new programs—Let’s Talk and the Academic Skill Assessment Program—and initiating a pilot program for appointment scheduling that is designed to reduce wait times.

Students often express dissatisfaction with the wait times for individual

appointments in SCS. Under Kumar, the department has put an increased focus on shortening wait times, and in response has begun a pilot program for appointment scheduling that leaves open nextday appointment availability.

SCS has also introduced a 24/7 call line through which students can speak with a mental health clinician. The call line has not been widely advertised, but Kumar said SCS is trying to make students aware of the new service. “Students are on kind of a different time cycle, and now at 2 a.m. in the morning, in case they wish to reach someone, there is someone at the other end of the call,” she said.

More generally, SCS faces the challenge of advertising their resources to students, Kumar said. Their YouTube channel has recently added short video overviews of offered services including eating concerns counseling, group therapy, the Academic Skills Assessment Program, LGBTQ+ and underrepresented minority support, medication management, referral support, urgent care, and Let’s Talk.

The new Health and Wellness Center, set to open in the fall, is also central to SCS’s efforts to provide more care to students. The center has received a mixed response from students. Some feel it is merely a symbolic gesture that does not address the stress culture at the root of mental health concerns on campus.

In response to these complaints, Polizzi told The Maroon that he finds it discouraging when students build a narrative that the center is unhelpful.

“I don’t want to minimize anyone who’s expressing feelings that they might be struggling, and they have concerns,” Polizzi said. He noted that the wellness center will expand resources and lower the barrier for students to walk in the door and receive clinical and nonclinical care.

Polizzi continued, “[but] if there is a narrative where students are saying, ‘Well, that’s a token thing that doesn’t really help,’ that kind of pains me because if that’s out there and students are discouraged from seeking help, that’s unfortunate.”

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First Veteran Undergraduates Adjust to University Life

By ADYANT KANAKAMEDALA Senior News Reporter While most first-years start at the University of Chicago a few months after high school, some take gap years or transfer from other undergraduate institutions.

But for a select few, studies in the College begin after years of military service. Last quarter, the University inaugurated its first cohort of veteran undergraduate students, all of whom spent time as enlisted soldiers before attending UChicago. Some of the veterans had similar troubles adjusting to life at UChicago as their first-years peers: struggling with unfamiliar kinds of math, developing study habits and ways to manage stress, and living in a new and unfamiliar place.

First-year Kaedy Puckett’s Math 112 class was the first time she found that the persistence and diligence she developed while serving in the military didn’t automatically produce success. While she often could overcome challenging situations in the military through perseverance, her schoolwork required a more directed approach.

“It’s very rare, in my opinion, in the military that I come across something I cannot learn to overcome by persistence or just sheer effort,” she said.

“When I was experiencing some of this super rigorous academic stuff that I was not prepared for, I did not have any background in, and I did not have the proper prerequisites. That was really frustrating for me.”

Tyler Edwards, another member of the cohort who served in the Navy for four years before he came to UChicago, had a similar experience.

“Unless you’re here, it’s really difficult to explain how different the rigor and the environment is, and just the level of intellect and intellectual stamina needed to be successful at Chicago,” he said.

Puckett, the only woman in the cohort, spoke openly about her transition from the military to college.

After serving in Afghanistan, North Africa, and around the Mediterranean, Puckett returned to the United States in 2014. She spent a year at a base in Geor-

gia before being stationed as a military training officer at Naval Station Great Lakes. While there, she began researching opportunities for post-military life and came across a non-profit, the Warrior Scholar Project, which places veterans in one- and two-week programs in universities across the country. The Warrior Scholar Project allowed Puckett to spend a week at Syracuse University in 2017, an experience that pushed her to look into going back to school.

“I remember sitting on the quad during a lunch break reading an assignment and I felt so alive,” she said.

“I felt a sense of purpose I hadn’t felt in the military in a while. And I thought, ‘I need to go back to school. It’s time for a change. It’s time for me to finish my education.’”

Edwards joined the military after high school. “I dropped out of high

school for two years, when I was 15 and 16, because my mom got sick,” he said.

“So, I worked for two years. Then I came back to high school and graduated as valedictorian. I decided that I wasn’t ready for college, because I know I needed more discipline. I needed more.

I needed to focus better. So, I decided to go to the military,” he said.

For four years, Edwards served as a cryptologic technician in the Navy, leading a small team on intelligence matters. Following his time in the military, he studied at a community college in Santa Barbara for a year and a half.

Edwards found out about the new program at UChicago through Service to School, another non-profit that connects veterans to higher-education opportunities.

Even though he went to Santa Barbara City College first, Edwards’s tran-

Edwards served in the Navy before he came to UChicago. JEREMY LINDENFELD

sition to UChicago wasn’t perfectly smooth. Community college had prepared him for the habits and rhythms of college, but it did not prepare him for UChicago’s academic intensity.

Puckett echoed this sentiment. She did not anticipate Math 112’s difficulty—she described it as the “hardest thing I’ve ever done.” She did not always find the skills and habits she developed in the military, such as waking up early, or working hard and diligently, helpful for approaching schoolwork.

The course led her to have what she called a “math breakdown” in a Student Counseling Service meeting. The academic load compounded with the change of moving from Evanston to a much smaller apartment in Hyde Park stressed her out, she said.

Edwards said he experienced similar CONTINUED ON PG. 5

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“And I thought, ‘I need to go back to school.... It’s time for me to finish my education.’”

CONTINUED FROM PG. 4

stress before tests. “If I had a bad day on the ship, I couldn’t sleep,” he said, “and that’s a similar experience here.” Frequent visits to office hours and the Center for College Student Success helped him develop study habits, a schedule,

and stress management techniques.

These problems aren’t unique to the veterans, Puckett pointed out. In her math class, she formed study groups and made friends through the class.

“You bond over struggle,” she said.

“That was the closest thing to the mili-

tary was the struggle, even though I had never struggled quite that much.”

Edwards agreed. He had found his astrophysics course—Matter, Energy, Space, and Time—particularly difficult.

Ultimately, though, he found the experience rewarding. “That’s why I came

here, because I wanted to push myself in many different ways. I think this is why all of us come here: to push ourselves to the limit, you know, to the absolute limit intellectually.”

Accelerated Wellness Center Timeline Fails to Silence Calls for Reform

By LAURA GERSONY Senior News Reporter Despite ongoing demands from student activists, the University’s new Health and Wellness Center is now projected to open in full by autumn 2020, rather than in winter 2021 as initially announced.

According to University spokesperson Gerald McSwiggan, the Student Health Service (SHS) will relocate over spring break and open at the new facility at the beginning of spring quarter.

Student Counseling and Health Promotion Services are scheduled to begin operating out of the center by autumn quarter 2020.

The wellness center, which will be located at the corner of 59th Street and Maryland Avenue, will jointly house SHS, the Student Counseling Service (SCS), and Health Promotion and Wellness in one location. These services are all currently located in different facilities.

The wellness center’s construction has faced pressure from the student activist group Fair Budget UChicago (FBU), which hosted a forum on the center last month. Among the group’s demands are reduced wait times for counseling services, increased student oversight over the new center, and expanded identity-based support groups.

Representatives from FBU wrote in a statement to The Maroon that the group’s demands remain, regardless of the accelerated timeline.

“FBU appreciates that administrators see the urgency of improving wellness services and increasing staff,” representatives wrote. “However, we are still waiting for public communicaCONTINUED ON PG. 6

Student Counseling Services currently at 56th and Woodlawn. JEREMY LINDENFELD

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“The University also envisions the wellness center as a meeting place for wellness activities, including workspaces for students.”

CONTINUED FROM PG. 5

tion regarding qualitative and specific quantitative changes we can expect with the opening of the new center.”

McSwiggan wrote in a comment to The Maroon, “Since 2015, Student Counseling Service (SCS) has increased the number of clinical providers by 49%. The new Wellness Center will enable us to continue this trend

by supporting increased flexibility in programming and staffing – both in type and quantity – with the goal of increasing access to care for students.

Additionally, we have instituted online scheduling for Student Health Service and are looking to do the same for SCS.” Administrators also say that centralizing these offerings under one roof will streamline the check-in pro-

cess and allow students to be referred between SHS and SCS more easily. Assistant Vice President for Student Services Mario Polizzi said at a Student Government meeting that housing SCS along with other wellness services will reduce the stigma surrounding mental health resources and discourse on campus.

The University also envisions the

wellness center as a meeting place for wellness activities, including workspaces for students.

More details about the center’s construction can be found on the University’s Wellness Center Updates website page.

Students Explore Mental Health Stigma at IOP Roundtable

By KATE MABUS News Reporter At a roundtable discussion entitled “The Politics of Mental Health,” held

by Leaders of Color at the Institute of Politics (IOP) on Tuesday, February 11, students explored how mental health stigma and common misunderstandings perpetuate mental illness, globally and on campus. The discussion explored the rhetoric and development of self-care in the modern, capitalist age, as well as nuances of mental health, including identity, ability, stigma and the economic consumption of self-care.

Second-year Dayo Adeoye presented and guided the discussion, which was part of the IOP’s Politics and Identity series. Adeoye began with a quote by writer and civil rights activist Audre Lorde: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

Adeoye explored how physical desires, including self-care, are suppressed by society for capitalist productivity and political cooperation.

Recently, she said, society has both exacerbated mental health issues and commodified the rise in mental illness into a highly profitable industry of self-care. Google searches for the term “self-care,” for instance, spiked after the 2016 election.

The group then discussed the lack of diversity and economic accessibility in the self-care market today, and related the urge to use mental health as a mode of productivity to the culture of stress

on campus. “They are two sides of the same coin. I guess that’s my main thesis: You can’t separate mental health from politics,” Adeoye said.

Adeoye later asked attendees to raise their hands “if your mental wellness has been at its peak while at UChicago.” The group went quiet and extended cursory glances and grins; no one raised a hand. During that part of the talk, students identified UChicago as a microcosm for common misconceptions of mental health and society’s frequent pitfalls when addressing the concern.

Participants also discussed how some states, such as Massachusetts, have approached the mental health crisis as a biological issue that can be explained by genetics and cured by medical and pharmaceutical resources. The group agreed that this solution lacked understanding of the role that social systems play in mental illness.

Students began to express frustrations with what they see as the University’s inadequate treatment of mental illness on campus. One student said he felt that, at the University, “there’s a tension between seeing someone as an individual capable of reason and someone struggling with mental health.” He said the rigor of UChicago and its work culture can exacerbate mental illness for students and lead to stigma.

The new student wellness center, set to bring together services currently spread across campus in 2021, was highlighted during the conversation.

Some attendees at the talk felt its ad-

vertisement is an act of tokenism from the University administration to address student grievances by expanding resources and intake, rather than tending to the root problem of campus stress culture. Attendees also worried that the center would perpetuate stress culture by cornering self-care into an isolated area of campus. Someone at the discussion described the administration’s outlook on self-care with the attitude, “You poison yourself and then you go get the antidote.”

A female student shared one experience with the Student Counseling Service (SCS): After counseling could not fulfill her request for an appointment, she attended a Let’s Talk walk-in therapy session expecting to meet with a therapist from her background, but instead had to meet with a different therapist than who had been advertised.

She used her experiences to imagine a mental health system in which practitioners visit student cultural centers.

The group agreed that to overcome barriers to accessing resources and to improve mental health on campus, the University should work to integrate self-care into student life, rather than treating mental health as a separate medical issue.

In a follow-up email to The Maroon, Adeoye wrote that she put together the discussion because of a conversation she had with her family, including a family member who is an executive assistant in the University administration, over winter break.

Adeoye’s family did not understand

the student body’s frustration with the University, including what more students wanted from the administration after the recent investment in SCS. “Their biggest point was that schooling is never meant to be easy or fun, but with the stakes being so high and the recent deaths [during fall quarter] on campus, I was not satisfied with their opinion,” Adeoye stated. “Personally, for me, there have been many suicides of people I knew from my hometown this year alone.”

Hearing her family ’s confusion about the needs and requests of students, Adeoye crafted the presentation so that students could better articulate and overcome the barriers to self-care that they experience. “What I hoped the group took away from the discussion was an understanding of how common notions of self-care and mental health can be deconstructed, as well as knowing how the idea of selfcare has been an exclusionary tool that reinforces problematic rhetoric and beliefs,” she said. She also hoped the conversation would send the message that “school should definitely never be something that impedes on the health of its students.”

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S OFÍA G ARCÍA M ARTÍNEZ

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VIEWPOINTS

Living With Anxiety and Working for UChicago The University’s Hierarchial Culture Worsens the Already Severe Effects of an Anxiety Disorder

By ANNA KNAFL Anxiety has permeated every aspect of my almost 20 years on this campus, first as a grad student and now as a librarian. To be fair, I have generalized anxiety disorder, so anxiety would be a part of my life regardless of where I worked. But my experience is that the culture of this campus cultivates anxiety, which makes living with an anxiety disorder a daily slog. Here are my observations of why that is: Hierarchy, hierarchy, hierar-

chy.

The University feels like a feudal kingdom—or a collection of fiefdoms within a feudal kingdom, each one arranged in hierarchical relation to the others and each with its own hierarchical system. Much of our time is spent trying to move up or function within the hierarchy while avoiding the wrath of the powerful. Who has the power to fix a problem? Am I allowed to speak to them directly, or do I need to cc a supervisor?

Do I need to cc a supervisor anyway in order to make sure

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SUHA CHANG my request is taken seriously?

It’s exhausting. And it makes it really hard to form and foster human connections or to know someone’s true intentions. My anxiety disorder makes me project all my insecurities onto others. If you’re already prone to assuming everyone hates you and that you don’t belong, the dehumanizing effects of a strict hierarchy will amplify and give authority to those feelings.

A lack of communication and transparency.

The primary currency of our

fiefdoms is information; your place in the hierarchy is measured by your access to information. Information is hoarded by those at the top and doled out in small chunks through the labyrinthine committee structure, itself a hierarchy.

Or, it’s transmitted behind closed doors by a supervisor to a favored staff member, or in Friday afternoon mass emails to the entire community announcing sweeping changes to things no one thought needed fixing. But even if you are

one of the favored or on one of the “important” committees, you’re likely not involved in any impactful decision-making. You’re there as a sounding board for whoever convenes the group and who will be making the decisions regardless of your input. It’s infuriating. But it also makes it really hard to just do your job. My anxiety disorder makes me “catastrophize.” I envision everything that could go wrong. One way to manage those thoughts (which can get CONTINUED ON PG. 9

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“In this environment of uncertainty, I struggle with the constant feeling that I may be breaking the rules and I won’t be able to defend myself against repercussions.”

CONTINUED FROM PG. 8

really scary) is to strategize how you would react if something went wrong. But, when crucial information is withheld on a daily basis and there is no clear method for accessing that information, strategizing just creates more anxiety.

ALVIN SHI

Policies: unenforced, over-enforced, or nonexistent.

Do you know your department’s policy for family leave?

For working from home? For dress code? For purchasing an ergonomic chair? For requesting comp time? For using email?

Would you know where to find these policies if you wanted to read them? I don’t. When I ask my colleagues, I receive wildly different answers. Few can point to written policies, and even when they can, there’s no guarantee they are uniformly followed. The result? I literally cannot follow the rules because I don’t know them, or because they don’t exist, or because I’ve been told the wrong thing, or because they’ve changed and no one told me. Clarity and simplicity help me manage the nonstop chaos of second-guessing that my anxiety disorder evokes. In this environment of uncertainty, I struggle with the constant feeling that I may be breaking the rules and won’t be able to defend myself against repercussions.

These aspects of our culture trigger anxiety while creating an environment that makes it really hard to manage anxiety. They also represent deep, structural problems that feel insurmountable. Even the simplest of issues can lead to a morass that leaves me feeling like the entire system is designed to unwind all my best efforts to not have a panic attack in my office. Even worse are the days when my experience of situational anxiety is denied by folks who, because they do not have the same experience, can’t or won’t acknowledge that a given situation could cause anxiety.

I have a lot of days when I feel like this campus is a lost cause and nothing will ever change; it will only continue to be terrible in different ways.

That said, I know that I’m not alone, and that many of us are struggling against these forces.

But we need help. We need to be part of the decision-making process. We need to be trusted.

We need to be able to trust our leadership. We need a genuine commitment to building a culture of empathy and support in which we can all thrive.

Anna Knafl is Bibliographer for Religion, Philosophy, snf Jewish Studies in Regenstein Library.

THE CHICAGO MAROON — FEBRUARY 19, 2020

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For Truly Effective Health Care, Listen to Students Despite a Shiny New Wellness Center, Administrators’ Approach Toward Mental Health Ignores Student Voices

By MAROON EDITORIAL BOARD Here is a non-exhaustive list of student groups that have organized in the last year to address mental health on this campus: Student Government’s CARE slate, Phoenix Survivors Alliance (PSA), Lean On Me, the Campus Policy Research Institute (CPRI), UChicago Student Action (UCSA), UC United, and the Emergency Fund. As the efforts of these student groups show, UChicago is certainly not lacking in advocacy or student action around mental health. Myriad student demands related to mental health include cultural competency training for therapists, greater availability of counselors, shorter wait times for student counseling services, and changes in the referral process for mental health.

Viewpoints columnists and guest writers have lent thousands of words to this subject in The Maroon: Hannah Edgar’s “UChicago Needs to Fully Commit to Part-Time Status”; Livia Miller’s “Without Mental Health Resources, There Is No Life of Mind”; and Jay Gibb’s “Student Counseling Services: For A Limited Time Only” are all stellar examples. Students report long wait times for mental health services and, according to a survey by the student research group CPRI, many students who do receive care are unsatisfied with their experience.

This conversation, however, has been largely one-sided. Students write about, organize around, and conduct independent research into the state of mental health on campus, and get only silence from higher-ups in university administration in response. This is not to say that UChicago takes no action on student mental health.

Tangible steps include a new 24-hour phone line that connects students with a counselor, two new case managers, and the new Wellness Center. Indeed, all of these initiatives promise to improve mental health services available on campus. But none seem

to respond to the stated needs of actual undergraduate students. Students are in the best position to voice their own mental health needs and identify holes in the University’s current services. Our University should be proud that its student body is organizing and advocating for itself, and that students are building infrastructure to support one another, like the student-run Emergency Fund and UChicago’s Lean On Me network. But instead of answering student voices and using them to inform their decisions, the administration devises its own solutions, often failing to address the needs of students.

When undergraduates ask for shorter counseling wait times and a larger, better-trained counseling staff, the school brings in therapy dogs for an afternoon, then announces their untimely demise.

And far from taking structural steps to reduce academic stress, the University recently debuted new standards for Latin Honors, Dean’s List, and other academic awards—likely to promote competition and stress on campus—without so much as offering an announcement that the change had happened to the student body.

In other cases, the administration’s approach towards mental health seems to neglect student voices entirely. Earlier this month, the Bursar’s Office announced the creation of an emergency fund, co-opting the mission and structure of UChicago’s existing student-run Emergency Fund, without crediting its creators. What’s more, in the creation of an official University Emergency Fund, the University did not consult the student activists who worked for years to establish this resource in a vacuum of administrative support. As Jahne Brown, a founder of the original fund, explains in a recent Viewpoints piece, the problem is not just that the student organizers of the Emergency Fund—led by students of color—were robbed of credit for their work,

JESSICA XIA

although that is shameful. The bigger problem is that in failing to consult them, the University missed an opportunity to meaningfully solicit input from students, despite the fact that students had already successfully developed their own Emergency Fund. As a result of this failure to engage with students, the University-designed fund has several shortcomings that the students behind the Emergency Fund already encountered and addressed. A process that incorporated student input could have identified these problems before the University’s fund launched; instead, a flawed design process produced a flawed product.

This is not merely a political struggle between the student body and administration. The administration’s stance towards mental health puts students at risk. In implementing new infrastructure to support mental health on campus, it is vital that the University seriously consider student voices.

On February 20, Student Government

will host a mental health town hall for the campus community, with cooperation from Student Counseling Services. It hasn’t escaped our notice that, once again, it is only because of students’ leadership that a town hall is taking place. We commend student activists like Brown and call on the university to recognize their efforts, give credit where it is due, and to listen and respond to student complaints rather than repeat talking points and offer public relations-minded band-aids. The point of this editorial is not to repeat the same arguments outlined in numerous Viewpoints columns, letters to the editor, student government campaign slates, and student-published research, not to mention the private conversations of thousands of UChicago students. Instead, we write this editorial to ask that the administration address those arguments in a public forum with the campus community. Students have spoken; students are speaking. It’s time for the University to listen, and to respond.

THE CHICAGO MAROON — FEBRUARY 19, 2020

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Let Comprehensive, Independent Research and Data Guide University Policies on Mental Health Campus Policy Research Institute Found Shocking Results Concerning Mental Health From Latest Campus-Wide Climate Surveys LETTER TO THE EDITOR The Campus Policy Research Institute (CPRI) is a nonpartisan, student-run think tank dedicated to the study of issues critical to student life at the University of Chicago. Our mission is to propose implementable, evidence-based policy recommendations to inform decision-makers at all levels in a continued effort to advance the interests of all students. Since our founding, we have launched six independent studies on topics ranging from student mental health to student governance.

This fall, we took on the study of student mental health at the University of Chicago with the greatest sense of urgency and gravity. Two project teams undertook comprehensive research efforts to better understand the state of student mental health at the University and the various policies we could implement to improve mental health–related resources on campus.

Our internal team studied the context of the problem of mental health at the University of Chicago while our external team conducted research at peer institutions to see how other colleges were more successfully addressing the issue. Both teams produced reports that are now published on our website, and we encourage you to read them at www.cprichicago.org.

Our internal report is intended as a comprehensive assessment of the state of mental health at the University of Chicago. Researchers conducted a campus-wide climate survey to understand how students were interacting with mental health resources provided by the University as well as interviews with key administrators and various stakeholders. The results were shocking. While 82.6 percent of responding undergraduates have considered using Student Counseling Service (SCS) ser-

vices, only 49.8 percent have gone to SCS to receive help. This discrepancy widened when it came to queer students and students of color. Additionally, over 65 percent of students reported a wait time of at least two weeks before receiving SCS assistance, and the majority claimed to be “unsatisfied” after their appointments. As a whole, mental health services at the University are understaffed and underfunded in their current state.

Our external report focused on finding solutions to the issues identified in our internal report. Researchers first identified which schools we could consider comparable to the University of Chicago in terms of the mental health programs they provide. Additionally, standards were set for what successful mental health programs ought to accomplish. Mental health programs at these peer institutions were then evaluated according to our standards, and the most promising ones identified for further investigation. Our researchers visited MIT, Boston College, and Northwestern, schools with top mental health programs, and conducted on-site surveys and interviews to better understand exactly how students were engaging with the resources on their campuses. Results from the surveys were used to determine how successful these programs were, and we crafted a nuanced list of policy recommendations for the best mental health resources we could implement here at UChicago.

The first policy we advocate for is a University of Chicago fund for student mental health projects. This exciting program would create a grant-funding agency through which students and faculty can apply to finance their own independent mental health and wellness–related projects. We believe it will empower students in the collective

effort to combat mental illness by harnessing the innovation potential of our student body toward a vital cause. Instead of the one-size-fits-all, top-down remedies that often fail to address the root causes of student problems, such a fund would be able to combat mental health issues as they arise on our campus. Most importantly, this fund is entirely feasible, as it has worked with proven, cost-effective success at our peer institutions. In fact, the net costs of MIT’s fund, the MindHandHeart Innovation Fund, have been only $180,000 over a period of four years, an insignificant fraction of the UChicago operating budget. The fund developed Lean on Me, a program that has spread to the University of Chicago and become one of the most well-known peerto-peer mental health resources on our campus.

Our second proposal, a centralized academic planning office, is much more ambitious, but would perhaps lead to the most significant improvement in student well-being. This office would be a centralized location for students in need of academic exceptions due to stress, mental illness, or other personal-life factors. Staffed by mental health professionals rather than academic advisers, this office would allow struggling students to create academic plans that best suit both their academic and personal needs. Faculty would then be bound to whatever academic exceptions prescribed by the office—be they essay extensions, moving exams, etc. Interestingly, at MIT, there is no tension between professors and MIT’s planning office; professors often recommend students to the office, as they recognize that a student’s well-being comes before the due date of a problem set or a paper. Sympathetic, trained care from mental health professionals is far more conducive to students’

success than when these decisions are left to the whims of untrained and sometimes unsympathetic academics.

Over 80 percent of MIT students surveyed had used the planning office, and there was an overwhelming consensus that this service had made a positive, substantial impact on students’ lives.

Overall, a centralized academic office would allow students to realize their potential and perform at the highest level while taking care of their own health and well-being.

There is much more to our reports than what we have written above; to say that this has been an effective encapsulation would not do our hardworking researchers justice. As such, we encourage you to take a few minutes and read our two reports on mental health. The more informed students are, the closer we get to true change—change that needs to happen, and, if the student body stays educated and innovative, will happen.

This is something we firmly believe applies to many of the issues we face on our campus. If you feel like there is an aspect of student life that is currently understudied or unquantified, please do not hesitate to reach out and make your concerns heard.

Signed, The Directors and Researchers of Campus Policy Research Institute

THE CHICAGO MAROON — FEBRUARY 19, 2020

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The Case for (and Against) Cultural Centers AMID SUPPORT FOR CULTURAL CENTERS AS MENTAL HEALTH RESOURCES, SOME DOUBT IMPACT

By CAROLINE KUBZANSKY Managing Editor–elect

Student activists have been pushing for cultural centers—buildings designated for students of a particular racial or ethnic minority, like a Black House or a Pan-Asian House—for more than four years. A new quantitative study by a UChicago professor argues that these centers, or “counterspaces,” would benefit nonwhite students’ mental health and could improve lagging graduation outcomes for minority students.

Last month, comparative human development professor Micere Keels published Campus Counterspaces: Black and Latinx Students’ Search for Community at Historically White Universities. The book examines how racial-ethnic identity shapes the experiences of Black and Latinx students at predominantly white institutions — institutions which were not always open to students of color.

One study by Keels found that “strategic disintegration,” or periodic separation of non-white students from a majority-white campus, benefits the mental and emotional experiences of students of color.

The study tracked over 500 students from historically marginalized backgrounds—that is, Black, Latinx, mixed-race, or indigenous heritage—throughout their time enrolled at five historically white institutions in Illinois, and found that those with access to “counterspaces,” or places reserved for nonwhite students, where their racial or ethnic background do not make them stand out, had more positive college experiences and were more likely to graduate within six years.

Right now, Keels told The Maroon, there is a disparity in outcomes for students of color and white students once enrolled.

Keels said that one of the roots of this inequality is the way students of color at his-

torically white institutions are vulnerable to feelings of isolation, disillusionment, or lack of connection to their schools. She sees cultural centers, which have programming built around and inspired by the backgrounds of students of color and offer them space in which they are not minorities, as a way to improve mental health and graduation rates for students of color.

Although the University of Chicago has an extremely high graduation rate overall, Black and Latinx students have a six-year graduation rate of 88 percent, lower than the rate for white students, 94.7 percent.

“Even though the graduation rate for all students is high here, you still see these racial and ethnic and income gaps in graduations. But if you look across the country, less than half of Black students and I think just over half of Latinx students that enroll at college graduate,” Keels told The Maroon.

Michelle Yang is a fourth-year who founded UC United, “a coalition of multicultural student organizations formed to make the University of Chicago campus more inclusive” for students of color. She said that, while talking with friends one day, she realized that the majority of her friends and acquaintances who had taken a leave of absence or left school were people of color.

“We’re like, people we knew took a bunch of leaves, but we’re thinking about it and those are mostly people of color. We don’t have statistics, but because I’m friends with certain people and we come together, we realize our experiences aren’t individual,” Yang said.

Yang believes that many nonwhite students take leaves of absence due to a sense that “the University…right now isn’t a place for students of color.”

The movement has gained traction with top student leaders. Fourth-year Kosi Achife, Vice President for Student Affairs, has been a vocal advocate for cultural cen-

ters.

“I think there’s an underbelly of campus of people who take leaves of absence, for a quarter or for a year, who have to take a 13th quarter, who have had to drop out of school altogether,” Achife told The Maroon, “and they’re disproportionately low-income, queer, and people of color.”

Yang, Achife, and Keels all see cultural centers as a solution to the graduation disparity and anecdotal proliferation of leaves of absences among students of color, along with functioning as places where these students are less likely to encounter racial or ethnic bias than they would be in a majority-white community.

Cultural centers, a central demand of UC United since the organization was founded in spring 2017, are physical spaces intended for minority students to gather, conduct programming, and decompress.

The spaces would be independent of the Office of Multicultural Affairs, whose mission is to “foster a campus environment that supports the exploration of varied identities and their intersections” and currently offers orientation events, mixers for graduate and professional students of color, and a speaker series on issues of race and ethnicity.

Olga Guerrero, a fourth-year organizer with UC United, said the organization wants different spaces within these cultural centers to address different subsets of larger racial and ethnic categories. For example, a Black House might have an Afro-Caribbean room, or a room in the Pan-Asian house could be dedicated specifically to Vietnamese-Americans.

UC United organizers emphasized that cultural centers would not be out-ofbounds for people who are not of the designated racial or ethnic minority.

To exclude non-Black or non-Latinx students, Achife said, would be “reproducing

the standards of exclusion that the University runs on with some of its buildings and programs. We want it to be open to the community.”

A cultural center, Guerrero said, “would be a space for us to have different kinds of programming for each center, teach-ins, or, say, programming that speaks to Afro-Latinx identities to bring more awareness to the fact that a lot of the time Afro-Latinx [people] are erased because they don’t tend to think of Black people as Latinx,” Guerrero said.

Guerrero said that she could not specify details about a Black House or a Pan-Asian House, because the “vision for each one is really planned out by the different cultural organizations that are part of UC United.

I can’t speak to specific features that, say, OBS [Organization of Black Students] would want to see, for example,” she said.

Guerrero said that cultural centers would showcase heritages that are less well-represented in the Core curriculum, which Keels identified as a source of potential isolation for students of color.

“If you don’t see yourself in the institution, in the artifacts of the institution, in the faculty that are there, in the texts that you read, it can be experienced as isolating and culturally disaffirming, because everything says these are the valued thinkers and bodies of knowledge and none of them look like you or represent your cultural tradition,” Keels said. Guerrero told The Maroon that UC United wants to stock cultural centers with art and literature representing those cultural traditions.

“One of the most important things we picture is a library in each of the cultural centers that includes more literature on our different cultures, the histories of our different cultures, more books that fall more under ethnic studies,” Guerrero said.

CONTINUED ON PG. 13

THE CHICAGO MAROON — FEBRUARY 19, 2020

13

“The idea behind cultural centers is to have these physical spaces that become the nexus of all the resources we want easier access to.”

CONTINUED FROM PG. 12

Addressing mental health, Guerrero said that UC United hopes the University would hire therapists for each of the cultural centers who are specifically trained in cultural competency and issues pertaining to students from non-white, non-upperclass backgrounds.

“The idea behind that is that it makes it easier for students to go to their cultural center and immediately find someone there that they could meet with and talk to,” she said.

Guerrero said that UC United envisions the cultural centers as home bases for different racial and ethnic communities on campus, in both a logistical sense and as gathering spaces.

“The idea behind cultural centers is to have these physical spaces that become the nexus of all the resources we want easier access to, so we don’t have to be running around the University—it would be a lot easier for us to go to this one specific center for easier access to resources,” Guerrero said.

Achife also said UC United hopes to address academic and professional needs through cultural centers.

“We can have tutors that won’t demean the intelligence of students of color,” Achife said. “We can have career advancement being able to meet students where they’re at, because we don’t all come from parents who were lawyers or politicians.”

Not everybody sees cultural centers as an unequivocal good. Fourth-year Ezra Max is skeptical that university-run Cultural Centers are the solution to problems around bias and isolation.

“I recognize that the ambient culture of college campuses is reflective of the sensibilities of upper class white men,” Max said.

“I know there are serious people doing serious thinking around these issues, and I don’t want to knock that.” But he argued that the high cost of the initiative could be counterproductive.

“Tuitions are high precisely because of these sorts of expensive bureaucratic initiatives, and high tuitions can make campus less diverse,” he said. If the University decides to establish cultural centers, Max said, “They will be another university apparatus which requires far, far more rigorous justification to reorganize or remove than

it ever did to implement.”

Another second-year student, who asked not to be named, had serious reservations about cultural centers as a solution to improving representation and programming for historically marginalized students.

“I’m not completely against cultural centers, but I do think they have problems when it comes to expressing certain cultures accurately,” she said. “Sometimes they’re created by people that aren’t actually associated with the culture and are just trying to make up for past misdeeds so they may not even highlight the culture of a particular group and may just emphasize the history of that group with the people who made the center.”

She also worried that after the publicity value of these centers wore off, they would be neglected or become inaccurate representations of the group for which the facility was allocated.

“A lot of times centers aren’t properly maintained either and are in odd or cheap locations because they don’t generate revenue so they may get defaced easily or not represent the culture that they mean to represent,” she said.

Fourth-year College Council (CC) Representative Eugene Miravete also expressed ambivalence on the subject.

“I’ve backed cultural centers while in College Council, mainly because it’s what my fellow students seem to want and what my fellow CC reps, whom I very highly respect, push for,” Miravete wrote in a message to The Maroon.

Miravete’s chief concern is that cultural centers will promote fragmentation along racial or ethnic lines on campus.

“I am willing to defer to my colleagues and constituents, especially when they agree. That being said, I have had a number of experiences at UChicago where I’ve had the feeling that some students here self-segregate. It is my understanding (and I could very well be wrong) that one of the arguments against cultural centers is that it would allow for such self-segregation.”

Keels said outdated theories of college student success may produce some of the remaining concerns about cultural centers.

“Traditional theories [say] that students should get to campus…and make the iden-

tity of the institution their identity,” Keels said. Many concerns around introducing cultural centers to college campuses centered on how they might disrupt this integration process for students of color.

People who oppose cultural centers argue that students should simply assimilate, Keels said. “Colleges and universities a couple generations ago opened themselves up to diversifying with the assumption that students from historically marginalized groups…wouldn’t push to change the culture of the institution.”

However, as the number of students of color at institutions of higher education has increased, what Keels calls “the diversity bargain” is less acceptable.

“Students’ families had no options or institutions were just opening up, so they were willing to accept that that was a price they were going to have to pay, to go to higher ed, is that they were going to have to leave their culture at the door,” she said.

Whether or not the administration is willing to bargain further, though, is another question. The Maroon tried to reach three administrators—Dean of the College John Boyer, Dean of Students Michele Rasmussen, and Vice Provost Melissa Gilliam.

Boyer said that Rasmussen would be better to speak with instead of him, and Rasmussen did not respond to an email request for an interview.

Declining a request for an interview

with The Maroon, Gilliam said, “These discussions are among students. I am not a part of them.”

Keels, who chaired the committee that produced the campus climate report, which attempted to survey attitudes and perceptions of students and administrators around race, ethnicity, and other diversity and inclusion issues in 2016, said that “institutions have been tolerant of diversity, but inclusion is hard.” Inclusion, she said, means that an institution is willing to alter itself for the sake of its members for whom the school was not originally built.

Yang and Achife both speculated about why administrators were not more receptive to the idea of adding cultural centers to campus. Both made clear that they were not speaking on the basis of facts, only the responses they had received so far from administrators.

“In the beginning, we were talking with Melissa [Gilliam] a lot,” Yang said.

“She didn’t want to come outright and say she didn’t support cultural centers, but she didn’t. I don’t know if it’s personal or part of her role as an administrator, but it’s clear that she doesn’t think it’s viable and doesn’t think it’s a worthwhile thing to pursue.”

Achife said she thought the University was against cultural centers because they interrupted a particular “vision” of the University centered on the unbridled exchange CONTINUED ON PG. 14

A student exits the University of Pennsylvania’s Greenfield Intercultural Center. HA TRAN

THE CHICAGO MAROON — FEBRUARY 19, 2020

14

“Clearly they have money for things. It’s a lack of political will.”

CONTINUED FROM PG. 13

of free thought. “There’s the free speech stuff and no safe spaces. I don’t know if they think a cultural center is a version of a safe space, which it’s not,” she said. She went on to note that UC United envisions cultural centers as places of learning and exchange between students of that culture and students from the rest of the University.

“From the way I’m understanding it, not having cultural centers within this grand vision of the College and grand vision of the University is a detriment to mental health,” Achife said.

Achife mentioned that UChicago often appears to make decisions with the goal of imitating peer institutions in the Ivy League like Harvard or Yale. She said that organizers at UC United had spoken to Harvard activists fighting for similar institutions to be introduced on their campuses and running into administrative resistance.

But, she said, “Harvard has the same

institutional problems regarding race, and I can only assume mental health, as UChicago, and so becoming more like Harvard won’t fix any problems, just make them manifest in a different way.”

Harvard did once have an African-American cultural center, which opened and closed multiple times throughout the 1970s before closing permanently.

In 1995, Harvard Dean of Students Archie Epps said cultural centers would promote atomization of Harvard’s increasingly diverse campus.

“It would be inconsistent with [Harvard’s] purpose to set aside space for racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. Third-world or multicultural centers promote racial separation,” Epps said.

Today, Harvard’s Harvard Foundation serves many of the same functions as UChicago’s Center for Identity and Inclusion.

Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford have had cultural centers since

A PUZZLE FOR EVERY BODY

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1969, 1984, and 1978, respectively.

Yang argued that the University has money that it is choosing not to spend on cultural centers.

“The mental health center is being built, the new south dorm—not to say that the mental health center is bad or anything, but clearly they have money for things. It’s a lack of political will. They don’t want it here,” Yang said.

Achife agreed. “We know that the money is there. They are using money to enact their vision on the University.”

Keels noted that cultural centers would be an investment in student recruitment and retention.

“If the institution wants to increase diversity in student recruitment, if a student who’s a member of whatever particular group, if it’s Black students, feel a strong sense of belonging is in itself a strong recruitment tool for future cohorts,” she said.

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“Having students who…will go out and recommend your institution and say great things about what it’s like to be a Black student here is a much better recruitment tool than having to create countermessaging,” she said.

Asked whether she sees the University as having to do extra promotional work to counteract negative narratives about the students of color at the University, Keels chose not to respond. However, Yang said that Boyer had expressed openness to a meeting with UC United about cultural centers when she last saw him. Guerrero confirmed that UC United was in contact with the dean’s office about a meeting.

“I did bump into Boyer at graduation and asked him if he would meet with us, and he said he was down,” Yang said. “Things are progressing, I guess.”

of boxes 56. Creator’s creation 57. ___ Sze Chuan (Chinatown restaurant) 6

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THE CHICAGO MAROON — FEBRUARY 19, 2020

“There is no one solution that will de-stigmatize mental health...”

CONTINUED FROM PG. 16

perfect. There is no magic that will suddenly lead to the unencumbered embrace of the thorny topic of mental health by all members of a community. There is no one solution that will destigmatize mental health among athletes, no one answer that will remind athletes that their mental health is just as important as their physical. As student-athletes, it is our ultimate responsibility to build communities that support

and accept our teammates and friends. It’s time we recognize this responsibility and express the mental battles and difficulties in which we all engage. There are so many people in this world who want to help, and we just need to be willing to seek them out when needed. By sharing my story, I hope that I can help to provide a network for others to do the same and remind athletes that nobody is alone.

15

THE CHICAGO MAROON — FEBRUARY 19, 2020

16

SPORTS

Confronting the Stigma

By ALISON GILL Sports Editor

The perks of being a collegiate athlete are well-known and well-documented, as ensured by the NCAA: the camaraderie of the team, the friendships forged through early morning lifts and on late night bus rides, the prestige, the sense of accomplishment and achievement that comes every time one dons the uniform. I recognize the fortune in the hand I was dealt; I get to play, with teammates whom I love, a sport that I love for a university that, all things considered, I love. There is a great deal of luck involved in getting me to where I currently am, and I count myself among the lucky few.

The life of a college athlete seems simple and blessed, right? At a young age, we set a goal for ourselves—to play sports in college—and we achieved that goal. Every practice, every game, every day is a testament to and evidence of our hard work, our talent, and our ambition. We did it; we get to live out our dream; we succeeded.

If only it were that simple.

In reality, a college athlete signs up for far more than just a sport, more than just the game. Committing to join a team and to play a sport in college remains just that—a commitment. It is a commitment to early morning lifting, to watching extra film, to voluntary conditioning, to finishing assigned work between walk-through and game time, to balancing a four-day travel weekend with three looming exams. Participating in college sports and the teams involved is fun and rewarding and completely exhausting. It is all of these things at once, and that is precisely what makes it so complicated.

In recent years, mental health has become an increasing concern in the collegiate athlete model as athletic departments and student-athletes have focused on erasing its stigma. This movement began in earnest in 2014 when Madison Holleran, a first-year track runner at the University of Pennsylvania, died by suicide. ESPN writer Kate Fagan, a former college basketball player herself, published a feature in 2015 that thrust the issue of mental health and college athletes into the national conscious-

ness and discourse.

It should come as no surprise that student-athletes struggle with their mental health. They are, after all, college students themselves, a group vulnerable to the pressures and stresses contained on campuses nationwide. In addition to the usual stressors, student-athletes must handle additional stressors that the general population does not, such as time demands, relationships with coaches and teammates, and athletic travel. Add in the fact that athletes are students uniquely accustomed to success and external feedback from teammates and coaches. According to the NCAA, only about 5 percent of high school athletes compete in college. The entire point of athletic training and competition lies in the pursuit of perfection. This is a group that has been taught, through coaches and experience, that they are able to overcome adversity and that a strong work ethic and determination result in individual and team victories. So what happens when those obstacles are internal, when the struggle is no longer against a physical opponent but rather within oneself?

A 2011 report from the American College Health Association found that, while college athletes suffer from anxiety and depression at slightly lower rates than their nonathlete peers, they are significantly less likely to seek help for those issues. Part of athletic accomplishment—and a part that many athletes take particular pride in—is toughness, not just physical but mental. This dangerous stigma around mental health in the athletic community can lead to devastating results; according to NCAA data, suicide was the third-leading cause of death between 2004 and 2008 for student-athletes after accidents and cardiac causes. High-profile deaths, such as Holleran’s and that of former Washington State University quarterback Tyler Hilinski, remind us of the stark consequences of such stigmas.

Besides anxiety and depression, student-athletes also struggle with personality disorders, eating disorders, and substance-abuse issues. For instance, according to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, eating disorders are twice as prevalent in female

athletes than in the general population. The NCAA reports that student-athletes binge drink at a higher rate than their peers and 30 percent of a survey population had experienced blackouts from drinking. These are troubling statistics, revealing a need for mental health awareness and built-in support. The NCAA has taken steps to introduce mental health awareness and support into its member institutions, and many athletic departments have added counselors onto their staffs. Former athletes, like University of Michigan defensive tackle Will Heininger and Oregon State gymnast Taylor Ricci, have spoken openly about their mental health struggles and created platforms and opportunities for other athletes to do the same. Ultimately, though, mental health is a deeply personal issue and one whose stigmas remain entrenched in sports.

When I describe these stigmas, I speak from personal experience. I have torn my ACL twice now, keeping me away from my sport for months at a time. Injuries are a common trigger among student-athletes, as they are both unavoidable and devastating. I know I am so much more than an athlete, yes, but I am still an athlete. Any knee injury strips me, however temporarily, of a fundamental piece of my identity. I have been rocked physically and mentally, forced to reexamine who I am when I am not a basketball player. There is solace to be taken in the fact that I am not alone, but there is fear and frustration in this fact as well. Many injured athletes find themselves facing sadness, isolation, anger, frustration, and disengagement in the immediate and long-term aftermath as they deal with an uncertain future in sport.

It is the unique and ironic curse of sports that the exact act of participating in sport can cause injury that prohibits further participation. Echoing the oft-quoted words of Mia Hamm, I like to think of the little girl— me—who first picked up a basketball and decided to never put it down. In the aftermath of my knee injuries, I struggled with the question of whether or not that little girl should have put the ball down at some point, a painful question to even consider but one that begged to be answered. In that place, in which I felt of my sense of identity

threatened and my future undefined, it was impossible to escape these pervading fears and anxieties. Instead of grappling with the complicated position of basketball in my life—an activity that had gifted me such immense joy for years and had subsequently, cruelly and unfairly, taken it away with one untimely play—it was easier to wish it all away. In my mind, it seemed like a simple trade-off: sacrifice the years of happiness in order to eliminate the present pain and turmoil. In short, I wasn’t happy, but I was resistant to finding solutions that would, perhaps, help me. It was only through the persistent persuasion of my family that I became willing to discuss and address my own anxieties.

After months of prodding, I finally saw a counselor. The first session was incredibly difficult; it was hard for me to articulate thoughts I barely wanted to admit to myself in front of a stranger. I felt silly and weak and like my own struggles were inconsequential: *A lot of people have been through much worse, so who I am to complain?* To this day, I still struggle with speaking openly about my feelings; writing this piece has honestly been a test. But I found reassurance and validation with the counselor. My personal anxieties and emotions were real and worth exploration. I do not need to internalize everything and insist that I am always “okay.” In fact, it’s normal and regular to not be okay some of the time. I found the simple act of conversation to be a cathartic one. For me, it was enough to simply vocalize my fears and doubts and uncertainties.

I only needed an impartial listener to help me realize that I am allowed to have fears and anxieties, that there is no shame in a struggle. I have come to the realization that just because I aim for perfection doesn’t mean that I always need to be perfect. Because of those sessions, I am so much better-equipped to handle my anxieties and to find outlets to express my emotions today.

I am fortunate in a lot of ways, and fortunate that I have not personally dealt with more serious mental health issues. But, over the years, I have seen plenty of other student-athletes who have. Even as we might pursue perfection, we do not need to be CONTINUED ON PG. 15