October 30, 2017

MONDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2017

PENN’S INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER

Our campus.

Our mental health.

UNIVERSITY RESOURCES

Counseling and Psychological Services 3624 Market St. Mon, Fri | 9 a.m.-5 p.m.

Tues-Thur | 9 a.m.-7 p.m.

Sat | 10 a.m.-3 p.m.

215-898-7021 215-349-5490 (after hours)

CAPS offers professional mental health services to all students. Trained clinicians offer individual, group and couples therapy. Staff members can also refer students to outside providers. Students can schedule appointments during business hours and reach emergency clinicians everyday including nights, weekends and holidays.

Penn Benjamins

484-483-3551 Sun, Mon, Tues 8 p.m.-11 p.m.

Harnwell Library, Mezzanine Office

Penn Benjamins is a student-run peer support organization. They provide short-term, confidential counseling and referral services to undergraduates.

All their counselors have participated in an extensive training process, overseen by professionals at CAPS.

Wed, Thur 8 p.m.-11 p.m.

Chaplain’s Office in Houston Hall

Reach-A-Peer Helpline (call)

215-573-2727 (call) (text) 215-515-7332 (text) Letter:

https://www.vpul.upenn.edu /secure/rap/submit.php

The Reach-A-Peer Helpline is a student-run resource through which students can reach trained peers for confidential support and referral information. Students can call 9 p.m.-1 a.m. seven days a week, submit online letters expecting a response within three days and text a line for 24/7 support.

Student Intervention Services 215-898-6081 215-349-5490 (after hours) Victim Support: 215-898-6600

HELP Line 215-898-4357

Student Intervention Services partners with various University departments to handle emergency situations on campus. Concerned students can confidentially contact the resource to help with locating and/or ensuring the safety of a student who may be in distress.

Active Minds

The HELP Line is a 24/7 resource which connects Penn affiliates to CAPS trained staff members of the Division of Public Safety who can provide information on the University's wellness resources.

Active Minds is a student-run, national organization which works to promote mental health awareness and education.

OFFICE OF ALCOHOL AND OTHER DRUG PROGRAM INITIATIVES | 215-573-3525 UNIVERSITY CHAPLAIN’S OFFICE | 215-898-8456 STUDENT HEALTH SERVICE | 215-746-3535 OFFICE OF THE VICE PROVOST FOR UNIVERSITY LIFE | 215-898-6081

A full list of resources can be found at: http://projects.thedp.com/2017/10/mental-health OPINION | PAGE 4

PHOTO | PAGE 6

NEWS | PAGE 12

SPORTS | BACKPAGE

A Letter to our Readers

A Tour of CAPS

Alone to Grieve

Our student-athletes

“A conversation about mental health can take a variety of forms. What it cannot tolerate is silence.”

Staff photographers visited Counseling and Psychological Services to see where Penn therapists do their work

After a Penn student dies by suicide, those affected don’t always receive the same level of support.

Penn Athletics prevents us from having frank conversations about athletes’ mental health and wellness

Executive Editor Dan Spinelli President Carter Coudriet

Photo Manager Ananya Chandra

Senior News Editor Rebecca Tan

Senior Sports Editor William Snow

FOLLOW US @DAILYPENN FOR THE LATEST UPDATES ONLINE AT THEDP.COM

SEND NEWS TIPS TO NEWSTIP@THEDP.COM CONTACT US: 215-422-4640

2 NEWS

MONDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2017

THE DAILY PENNSYLVANIAN | THEDP.COM

Lack of details on student deaths can pose burden

Cause of death is often not discussed by admins REBECCA TAN Senior News Editor

Fourteen Penn students have died by suicide since February 2013, but by student accounts, Penn administrators have never acknowledged this directly to the student body — even to those who have been intimately affected by these deaths. While students say they recognize the complexities of navigating a discussion on this issue, many want the University to provide more transparency and clarity in their efforts to support those who need help.

Penn typically does not identify cause of death when they announce student deaths, unless the student’s family prefers otherwise. Friends of students who have died by suicide also said administrators did not discuss their classmates’ causes of death with them in the days following the students’ deaths.

In an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian, Vice Provost for University Life Valarie Swain-Cade McCoullum said this is largely out of respect for the privacy of the stu-

ALANA SHUKOVSKY | DESIGN ASSOCIATE

dent’s family and — if the student has died by suicide — concerns over the well-being of other students already struggling with their mental health.

“Researchers generally agree that unlike physical illness, other types of illness, depending on how a community approaches it, can literally infect other community members who may be particularly fragile,” Cade said, seemingly referencing the “suicide cluster effect,” which is based on studies that show suicide rates can rise following an increase in certain types of narratives on suicide.

Cade also said VPUL “seldom” knows the cause of death when they are notified of a student’s passing and

do not necessarily make it a priority to find out. Typically, it is the Division of Public Safety that confirms cause of death from the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s office, though they do not share this information with students.

What happens when students need clarity about a classmate’s death?

A postvention is an “organized response” to a death by suicide. On university campuses, postvention efforts are typically led by the administration.

Several postvention guides, including one from the Higher Education Mental Health Alliance, which VPUL uses as a resource, write that

when communication on suicide is vague or limited, anxiety among those affected can increase, adding to their stress. “[During a postvention], it is important that the death be addressed openly and directly. After a suicide, once the basic facts are known, any attempt to delay informing students will only encourage rumors,” the HEMHA guide reads.

When Class of 2019 College student Aran Rana died by suicide in February 2017, two of his best friends, College juniors Navya Dasari and Colin Lodewick, experienced this anxiety first-hand. In the days following Penn’s email announcement, Lodewick, who is the Arts editor for 34th Street, said he spent weeks repeatedly looking up Hong Kong obituaries to figure out what had actually happened.

“I knew initially that it was suicide because I knew that [Rana] had struggled with depression, but I sort of had to confront that without having it backed up, which was strange,” Lodewick said. “I had to do detective work to find how one of my closest friends had died. It wasn’t something that it seemed the University was willing to help me with.”

Dasari, who learned about Rana’s cause of death from someone who lived in his apartment building in Hong Kong, agreed.

“It was important to me to know how he died because he was my best friend,” she said.

In the wake of a student death, family members may choose to give friends details of what happened including cause of death, but VPUL, which takes charge of providing “care and comfort and support,” doesn’t take this on as a responsibility, Cade said.

This separation of roles can pose a dilemma when students are looking for clarity.

“That’s the challenge — how do you comfort people who really want to know?” Cade said. “It’s a challenge. Since every case of a student death is different, I don’t think there will be ever be one answer [on] how.”

Leaving out details can be alienating, but getting them wrong is worse Many students said their frustration with the way Penn communicates student deaths stems largely from how the University misdescribed the death of Wharton

junior Olivia Kong in April 2016. In an email to Wharton students, Penn announced Kong’s death and called it an “accident,” although it was already largely known by her friends that Kong had died by suicide.

“Labelling it as an accident [as opposed to] a suicide are two completely different things that you should pay respect to, and I felt like — I felt a sort of betrayal,” said 2016 Wharton and Engineering graduate Calvin Nguyen, who was a member of Phi Gamma Nu, the business fraternity that Kong was in.

Nguyen also echoed Rana’s friends in stating that when Kong died, it was important to him to understand the circumstances of what had happened and to make sure those facts were right.

“When you get an email that refers to something as an ‘accident’ or brushes over the cause of death, especially if students have the understanding that it was a suicide, it feels like the school is trying to cover something up,” College junior and Penn Benjamins Co-Director Andreas Nolan said. “That can be very frustrating for students, when they feel like a problem isn’t being named or addressed.”

Students discuss mental wellness challenges at Civic House forum Topics included competitive culture and self-care NAOMI ELEGANT Contributing Reporter

Amid administrative outreach for information on student well-being, including a University-wide “Campus Conversation” and survey on student experiences, students gathered at Civic House on Oct. 25 to discuss how campus mental health resources can be improved.

Civic House hosted the open forum in conjunction with Project Let’s Erase the Stigma, the studentrun Penn chapter of a national organization that supports students with mental illness.

At the forum, which was facilitated by two Civic House program assistants, students brainstormed a list of mental health and wellness resources offered on campus and watched a short TEDxPenn video, “Shedding Light on Student Depression,” where speaker Jack Park, a 2015 College graduate, discussed his experience with mental illness.

Park talked frankly about his diagnosis with bipolar disorder, as well as about a time when he had thought about suicide. He said he wanted to share his story to decrease the stigma around mental illness.

Following the video, attendees shared their own experiences with campus mental health resources and discussed well-being at Penn.

Students said Penn’s competitive academic culture, emphasis on preprofessionalism and stigma around mental illness created an unhealthy culture for self-care.

Some brought up the administration’s responses to student suicides and other deaths, criticizing University email notifications as too impersonal and vague. Others described being overwhelmed by the list of mental health and wellness resources in these University emails, adding that the lack of information about the listed options made it difficult for students to know which of the options to use for their specific needs.

Fourth-year biology Ph.D. student Rohini Singh, who is an execu-

tive board member of the Counseling and Psychological Services Student Advisory Board, said members of the CAPS student board try to attend events like this forum as often as possible to get a sense of the conversations students are having about campus mental health.

While the CAPS student board is tasked with conveying “what the student community really thinks and needs back to CAPS,” Singh said, the main obstacle to addressing student concerns is a slow administrative process.

“We’ve been having constant discussions regarding what can be done,” she said. “We have been giving suggestions, but for the suggestions to take effect takes a while

because they also have to undergo that administrative policy change process.”

But despite this delay, Singh said she has seen improvements in mental health resources over her three years as a member of the CAPS student board. She listed the growth in CAPS staff numbers, an increase in operating hours and the addition of a 24/7 on-call staff member as examples.

The Penn chapter of Project LETS is dedicated to creating a space for students with lived experience of mental illness, primarily through their Peer Mental Health Advocate Program, which they plan to implement starting next semester. College sophomore Rylee Park

and Engineering sophomore Lauren Drake started the Penn chapter.

Project LETS’ collaboration with Civic House for the open forum was the Penn chapter’s first official event.

Prior to its collaboration with Project LETS, Civic House has hosted open forums with other student-led groups such as Penn First, as well as independent Civic House forums. According to College sophomore Johany Dubon, one of the Civic House program assistants, the forum is a way for students to meet new people by allowing organizations to use the Civic House space to hold facilitated discussions.

The next open forum will be during the second week of November.

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4

OPINION

Why we are devoting a day of coverage to mental health LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT & EXECUTIVE EDITOR

MONDAY OCTOBER 30, 2017 VOL. CXXXIII, NO. 82 133rd Year of Publication

In our three-and-a-half years working at The Daily Pennsylvanian, close to 10 students have died by suicide, a statis-

tic as remarkable to write as it is now commonplace to hear across campus. With each email from some Penn administrator,

CARTER COUDRIET President DAN SPINELLI Executive Editor LUCIEN WANG Print Director ALEX GRAVES Digital Director ALESSANDRO VAN DEN BRINK Opinion Editor REBECCA TAN Senior News Editor WILL SNOW Senior Sports Editor CHRIS MURACCA Design Editor CAMILLE RAPAY Design Editor JULIA SCHORR Design Editor LUCY FERRY Design Editor VIBHA KANNAN Enterprise Editor SARAH FORTINSKY News Editor

ANNE MARIE GRUDEM | ILLUSTRATOR

MADELEINE LAMON News Editor

we have grown numb to feeling pain, to mourning the death of someone close to us, to finally attaching a name to the problem of mental illness endemic to Penn.

Mental health is an intensely personal topic, shaped inexorably by the circumstances, preferences and lifestyle of an individual person. Starting a dialogue on mental health requires both patience to grasp at what is elusive and acceptance of the impossibility of capturing every nuance of stress, addiction and trauma. A conversation about mental health can take a variety of forms. What it cannot tolerate is silence.

Inside the DP and 34th Street today and online at http://projects.thedp.com/2017/10/mental-health/, an extraordinarily dedicated team of writers, editors, designers and photographers has singularly committed itself to breaking that silence.

For months, the DP and Street have been coordinating a day completely devoted to mental health coverage encompassing angles as varied as student narratives, tips for self-care and investigations of University

policy. If you’re looking for an update on how Penn football performed at Brown this weekend, or a look at how many crimes were reported during Halloweekend, theDP.com will continue to be updated with fresh content by the minute.

But today is one where one type of coverage — and one issue — reigns supreme.

By no less than a happy accident, the publication of our special issue on mental health falls on the same day as a “Campus Conversation” organized by Penn administrators to discuss “what we can do, individually and collectively, to take care of ourselves and others and to foster individual and community resilience.” That conversation, set to take place from 5-7 p.m. in the Zellerbach Theater, is one of the first instances we can recall of something that should come as instinct to University leadership: a willing acknowledgement that its students are struggling.

In announcing the event, Penn officials wrote, “A community that values wellness, community support, and resilience is best poised to find cre-

DAN SPINELLI CARTER COUDRIET ative and constructive solutions to our challenges.” We could not agree more with the spirit of this statement and we hope that in these pieces, interested readers can find a multitude of ways to begin confronting those difficult, necessary challenges.

DAN SPINELLI is a College senior from North Wales, Pa., studying English. His email address is spinelli@ thedp.com. He is the executive editor of the 133rd Board of The Daily Pennsylvanian.

CARTER COUDRIET is a College senior from Franklin Park, N.J., studying political science. His email address is coudriet@thedp.com. He is the president of the 133rd Board of The Daily Pennsylvanian.

ALLY JOHNSON Assignments Editor YOSI WEITZMAN Sports Editor

CARTOON

BREVIN FLEISCHER Sports Editor JONATHAN POLLACK Sports Editor TOMMY ROTHMAN Sports Editor AMANDA GEISER Copy Editor HARRY TRUSTMAN Copy Editor ANDREW FISCHER Director of Web Development DYLAN REIM Social Media Editor ANANYA CHANDRA Photo Manager JOY LEE News Photo Editor ZACH SHELDON Sports Photo Editor LUCAS WEINER Video Producer JOYCE VARMA Podcast Editor BRANDON JOHNSON Business Manager MADDY OVERMOYER Advertising Manager SONIA KUMAR Analytics Manager SAMARA WYANT Circulation Manager HANNAH SHAKNOVICH Marketing Manager MEGHA AGARWAL Development Project Lead

THIS ISSUE THEODOROS PAPAZEKOS Sports Associate MARC MARGOLIS Sports Associate JULIO SOSA Photo Associate

SARAH KHAN is a College freshman from Lynn Haven, Fla. Her email address is skhan100@sas.upenn.edu.

We need to address club recruitment processes GUEST COLUMN BY EDWARD JING, STUDENT ACTIVITIES COUNCIL CHAIR

LIZZY MACHIELSE Photo Associate CHRISTINE LAM Design Associate GILLIAN DIEBOLD Design Associate RYAN TU Design Associate ALANA SHUKOVSKY Design Associate TAMSYN BRANN Design Associate ALEX RABIN Copy Associate RENATA HOLMANN Copy Associate NADIA GOLDMAN Copy Associate ALISA BHAKTA Copy Associate MICHAEL SCHWOERER Copy Associate CATHERINE DE LUNA Copy Associate

LETTERS Have your own opinion? Send your letter to the editor or guest column to letters@thedp.com.

Unsigned editorials appearing on this page represent the opinion of The Daily Pennsylvanian as determined by the majority of the Editorial Board.

All other columns, letters and artwork represent the opinion of their authors and are not necessarily representative of the DP’s position.

Each year, freshmen and sophomores venture down the arduous path of applying to clubs. These students, who often held senior positions in multiple clubs while in high school, must start anew upon entering college. The club recruitment process is one of the first stressors that new students encounter when they arrive at Penn, and it has wide-ranging effects on both student life and mental health.

For the most part, club recruitment is exclusively studentrun, with current members conducting the selection process for prospective students, most of whom are still transitioning to college. The Penn administration does not involve itself extensively in clubs’ recruitment processes, resulting in students creating and perpetuating any practice they choose. These normalized practices remain simply because they have always been

an integral part of the process, resulting in the stifling of any innovation to recruit new members in the best way possible. As a result, applicants have been forced to write resumes, answer brain teasers intended solely to fluster them and respond to demeaning and humiliating questions during interviews.

These tactics have damaging effects on the experience of new students, especially when they are coupled with rejection.

With clubs boasting acceptance rates lower than that of Penn and recruitment processes that involve information sessions, coffee chats, protracted applications and multiple rounds of interviews, it is no surprise

that freshmen find joining clubs to be a daunting and stressful experience. In fact, club recruitment has become more and more

cent high school graduates need to think so far into their future, especially given everything else going on in their lives. Students do not join clubs in anticipation of applying to jobs, but to find communities and a home at Penn.

It is time that we all come together and reflect on our collective responsibility to improve the club recruitment experience for new students. We were all in their positions not too long ago and experienced the same barriers as they did in joining clubs.

There is simply no need for us to perpetuate aspects of the club recruitment process that we disliked or despised. This begins with members of clubs at all levels standing up and challenging

The club recruitment process is one of the first stressors that new students encounter when they arrive at Penn, and it has wide-ranging effects on both student life and mental health.” like on-campus recruiting, one of the most stressful events for students at Penn. Although some may argue that this process prepares freshmen for applying to jobs, there is no reason why re-

Have your own opinion?

Send your letter to the editor or guest column to:

unacceptable practices within their organizations and recommending their removal. From there, structuring the process to require fewer rounds of interviews, a list of activities instead of a resume and more time for applicants to complete applications are tangible steps that new students will appreciate for years to come.

At the end of the day, clubs should be a way for students to come together and build a community around similar interests.

Given the associated logistical limitations, it is unrealistic for clubs to accept all students that apply, but a practical first step to improve the club experience at Penn would be to improve recruitment processes.

EDWARD JING is a College and Wharton senior from Chadds Ford, Pa., and the chair of the Student Activities Council.

5

Acknowledging culture in our mental health discussions ROAD JESS TRAVELLED | On the unique challenges of mental health in different communities It comes as no surprise that mental health is a huge topic at Penn. With external tragedies that have claimed the lives of several Penn students in just this year, the need for campus discussion and reflection is more necessary than ever.

The administration has already made strides to acknowledge and facilitate honest dialogue about the subject. Emails about a “Campus Conversation” occurring today have been sent out to all undergraduate students. Counseling and Psychological Services is a constant resource for students, and many safe spaces in various organizations and cultural centers continue to exist for everyone.

However, when talking about mental health, it’s easy to get lost in such a vague, “hot-button topic” phrase. Mental health may be a general term, but in reality, it looks so different to so many different people, especially to various communities and cultural groups on campus.

Mental health in minority groups versus their white counterparts; mental health in international students versus American

students; mental health in various socioeconomic levels — mental health exists in many different lenses, and though many people do not fall into a certain category of mental health within their cultural or socioeconomic identities, there are still general discrepancies that exist and that we should acknowledge in our conversations.

Last semester, I had my own experience with CAPS, when I was feeling stressed-out and anxious in the middle of my freshman year. I attended weekly sessions, using the time to vent my feelings and sort through the problems in my head. I didn’t tell my parents until I came home for the summer, only because I felt like I had an obligation to let them know I had used such a resource.

Instead of providing immediate support and acceptance, my parents were at first defensive and confused. Why hadn’t I gone to them first? Why did I feel I needed professional services? Were they trying to prescribe me medicine I didn’t need? There was a tangible disconnect and misunderstanding, because my parents

did not grow up with a space to talk about mental health — in my culture, it was simply not talked about, and when it was, it was seen as a foreign, stigmatized issue.

This is not just my own singular experience — many Asian and Asian-American students

emphasize dialogue or openness — when faced with an issue, the immediate reaction is to silently work through it and assume internal strength. Often, when Asian students admit their own mental health problems to their family, they are met with a dismissal of their issues, with many parents

Mental health may be a general term, but in reality, it looks so different to so many different people, especially to various communities and cultural groups on campus.” here feel unable to discuss their own mental health issues to their parents, who do not understand how to talk about it, or who want to solve their children’s problems instead of simply listening to them and being supportive.

Many Asian cultures do not

believing it’s an overreaction or an exaggeration. Only when these mental issues lead to serious consequences do family members and the greater community pay attention.

International students, many of whom come from Asia, face the

additional issue of being isolated and extremely far away from their homes, without the luxury of going home and disconnecting with the Penn bubble. For them, the unique challenge of being foreign to the United States, along with combatting the Asian culture of stigmatizing discussion of mental health, magnifies the struggles they must face.

I cannot speak for the mental health experiences of other people, but listening to the concerns of black students after last year’s GroupMe incident and reading about the insecurities of low-income students in the Penn Disorientation Guide leads me to believe that we all face unique problems in the “labels” that we must exist under.

In our future discussions, we must be cognizant of and sensitive to the various issues that different communities face, and understand that mental illness is not a homogenous, symptomatic result of life at Penn. Whether that means encouraging support groups for specific communities of people or a more nuanced, wider discussion, we need to fos-

JESSICA LI ter a better space to talk about a large range of issues regarding mental health.

When we talk about mental health, let’s encourage a multifaceted view of the topic. Truly listening to the experiences of other people, regarding their background of any capacity, is essential in understanding and piecing together a more honest, eye-opening dialogue about mental health and what it means on Penn’s campus.

JESSICA LI is a College sophomore from Livingston, N.J., studying English and psychology. Her email address is jesli@sas.upenn.edu.

“Road Jess Travelled” usually appears every other Monday.

Addressing the anxieties of the transition to college SIMONETTI SAYS SO | How Penn can better tackle mental health issues concerning freshmen It’s no secret that mental health issues scourge college campuses.

One in every 12 college students makes a suicide plan, 49.5 percent reported feeling hopeless in the past year and 60.5 percent said they experienced loneliness.

In addition, a 2013 American Psychological Association survey found that 41.6 percent of college students listed anxiety as their biggest concern, followed by depression, with 36.4 percent.

Penn struggles with mental health too. It can be very difficult for students seeking help to utilize on-campus resources like Counseling and Psychological Services; there are usually long waiting times for appointments unless one describes their own situation as an emergency. Furthermore, 14 Penn students have died by suicide since February of 2013.

I was startled after coming across this information during late-night Google searches I conducted in anticipation of my freshman year.

How are freshmen supposed to make sense of all the tragedy that has struck Penn? And how can they ensure that they will be immune to the mental health issues that plague its campus?

They can make plans to implement exercise regimens and set aside time for relaxation, but juggling club responsibilities with rigorous coursework and forming new relationships is stressful, and often, students are more willing to fail themselves than their friends or classes.

Penn should not fail us too.

It is important that the University takes steps to ease the transition for freshmen. By allocating more attention and implementing new policies towards mental health resources, Penn can alleviate some of the anxiety that comes with living away from home for the first time and adjusting to a new community.

During freshmen year of college, students are at their most vulnerable. They are away from home for the first time in a daunting environment where there

is intense pressure to instantly make friends, ace midterms and figure out smaller things like doing their own laundry. Simultaneously, they must confront navigating an unfamiliar place and the beginning of adulthood.

I expected these struggles to be addressed in some form dur-

feeling very alone. Had one of the speakers at these panels acknowledged some of the difficulties of being a first-year college student or said something to normalize loneliness, NSO would have been much more effective.

But I felt as though there was something wrong with me be-

We are eager to do what is expected of us when the trend calls for it, but we don’t let that influence anything we do in real life.” ing my New Student Orientation at Penn, but they were largely ignored. I remember sitting through countless mandatory events on binge drinking and sexual assault between strangers whom I’d made small-talk with,

cause I wasn’t having the time of my life during my first week of college. I also felt behind. It seemed to me that everyone had already declared their majors, while I didn’t even know where my first class was.

There is so much that the administration could do to make things better for freshmen. Simply acknowledging that the first semester of freshman year is a challenging time would be a good start. But the University should also work to make it so freshmen feel as though they have a support system on campus.

The mental health resources at Penn are sparse and it is a large school that can feel cold and overwhelming. While improving CAPS would be ideal, the administration could also work to implement policies that strengthen the relationships freshmen have with their resident, peer and academic advisors so they actually become figures students can lean on for emotional support.

In light of the four deaths of Penn students Nicholas Moya, Justin Hamano, Henry Rogers and Brett Cooper this semester, as well as pressing off-campus events like the recent natural disasters and the Las Vegas mass shooting, Penn’s administration

ISABELLA SIMONETTI has arranged a “Campus Conversation” and an open CAPS forum.

Regardless of the effectiveness of these discussions, it is encouraging that the University is taking initiative to combat some of the issues Penn is facing. My hope is that similar attention can be paid to the Class of 2022’s transition to Penn so that freshmen know feeling lonely and anxious is normal.

ISABELLA SIMONETTI is a College freshman from New York. Her email address is isim@sas.upenn.edu.

“Simonetti Says So” usually appears every other Tuesday.

The need to destigmatize therapy CAL’S CORNER | Why I go to a therapist and you should too Trust me when I say this: We should all be seeing a therapist.

I don’t know anyone on campus who isn’t struggling with their mental health in some way, shape or form. And out of everyone that I know struggling, there was one person I had trouble identifying. Myself.

If you’re like me, you think that you understand mental health. You repost articles from BuzzFeed about why mental health matters. You’ve spoken about the concept of the “Penn Face” to your friends and denounced it. You’ve shared “destress” puppy events with your friends on Facebook. And of course, you are the biggest advo-

cate for Counseling and Psychological Services that you know.

But you don’t understand mental health as much as you think you do. You haven’t even read the BuzzFeed article you shared, and you have struggled to address the concept of Penn Face and how it affects you. You never have taken initiative to go to CAPS and feel like free puppies are not going to really help ease the mix.

In simpler terms, you tend to take care of others more than you take care of yourself. Now, more than ever, it is important for us to start treating mental health as much of a treatment issue as it is a campus-societal issue. I mean

this when I say it. We should all be going to therapy.

Many of us believe that therapy is only for people who are dysfunctional or suffering from mental health issues. Neither of those things is true. Therapy is for the students at Penn who are withstanding serious life challenges such as job searching.

Therapy is for the students at Penn who are having a hard time coping with an extremely difficult political environment. Therapy is for the students at Penn that feel alone within a campus full of thousands. Therapy may be for you.

Therapy is not about uncovering your life history and talking

JULIA McGURK | DESIGN ASSOCIATE

about the same problems over and over and over again with no solutions or synthetical approach to them. Therapy is about talking with someone who is trained to

for yourself, how to move from a place of poor emotional health to good emotional health, and how you respond to the connections you make with others.

Now more than ever is it important for us to start treating mental health as much of a treatment issue as it is a campus-societal issue.” understand the anxiety, depression and mental hurdles you are facing in a fashion that is likely more healthy than the approach you’re probably taking now.

Through the drug and hookup culture of Penn, many of us have terrible outlets to relieve our stresses and anxieties. And while it is always brave to selfcare however you do, therapy is an extremely helpful way, as it works as an outlet on a campus full of input. For myself, I found therapy to be helpful because it provided long-term solutions to many questions I had thought were simply short-term.

Good therapy is all about helping you feel better and make healthy decisions. It’s about redefining how you set boundaries

We all know that we have access to therapy through CAPS, whose trained clinicians offer individual, group and couples therapy. But beyond that understanding, we lack a much-needed deep intersection with CAPS as a student body, leaving phone numbers, campus flyers and school-wide emails as just another part of our day.

Why isn’t there a personal relationship between students and CAPS? For some, it may be how far CAPS is from their offcampus apartments. For others, it can even be about the cost of resources that CAPS refers outside of clinical services. For some, it may be fear of diagnosis.

As students face enough hurdles in their way towards mental

CALVARY ROGERS health, CAPS should not be one of them. CAPS provides services that tailor to short-term therapy for the majority of students, meaning that oftentimes students feel like their time at CAPS is limited and outside therapists can be too costly. I believe that students deserve a long-term therapy program through CAPS, because we are not dealing with short-term problems that a set number of appointments can solve.

We are all going through big changes that are worthy of a mental exhale from time to time. In the midst of tragedy from student deaths, fast-paced on-campus recruiting, and midterms every other day, we must find the time to take such an exhale. Therapy is an incredible place to start.

CALVARY ROGERS is a College junior from Rochester, N.Y., studying political science. His email address is calvary@sas.upenn.edu. “Cal’s Corner” usually appears every other Wednesday.

6 NEWS

MONDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2017

THE DAILY PENNSYLVANIAN | THEDP.COM

Yoga can relieve stress — but can be expensive

Pottruck and Penn Recreation offer regular classes KAITLYN BOYLE Contributing Reporter

Yoga has become increasingly popular among adults in the United States for stress-reduction, but few low-cost options to practice yoga are available near campus.

The group exercise pass for the Pottruck Health and Fitness Center costs $50 per semester for undergraduates. It allows students to attend an unlimited number of the approximately 60 classes offered each week. A pass just for yoga costs $225 per semester and allows access to around 20 yoga classes every week. Students can also purchase a 15-class punch card for $105 or purchase individual, $10 yoga classes.

Janna Rothschild, the assistant director of fitness and wellness at Pottruck, said yoga classes are more expensive because instructors need a “much more intense and expensive certification process.” She also said there is more student interest in the group exercise pass, but added that she did not know whether this was due to the price difference.

There are free options for yoga on campus, but none are offered as frequently as classes at Pottruck.

The Arthur Ross Gallery offers free yoga classes every Friday afternoon, and the Student Health Service and Penn Recreation jointly offer a free

JEAN CHAPIRO | STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

The student-run club Be Here Yoga offers free yoga classes every other Sunday morning in the Harnwell College House Rooftop Lounge.

class on Shoemaker Green once per month.

Student-run club Be Here Yoga offers free yoga classes every other Sunday morning in the Harnwell College House Rooftop Lounge.

College senior and Be Here Yoga instructor Elena Carrigan, who practices individually in addition to Be Here Yoga, said yoga can benefit Penn students with busy schedules because of its emphasis on mindfulness.

“You’re focusing on one thing instead of a thousand other things that may be going on in your life,” she said.

Lori Volpe, an instructor for the Penn Program for Mindfulness, recommends a regular yoga practice in order to make significant improvements in mental health.

“A little bit more [than every

other week] might be more helpful,” Volpe said. She added that unlike individual yoga practice, classes “can bring in synchronicity and can have social benefits.”

Volpe originally trained to do yoga with veterans and sexual assault survivors, who she said benefit from yoga because it “can help people get back in the body when they have become dissociated.”

College senior Karen Zhao, who founded Be Here Yoga in 2015, said that while the cost of the Pottruck yoga pass can be financially prohibitive, it is still less expensive than classes at local yoga studios. She added that traveling to studios offcampus is inconvenient, but allows students to find classes that best fit into their schedules.

“Reasonably, you would expect to pay $100 a month [at a private yoga

studio], but with that membership, you get unlimited classes every day,” Zhao said.

Robin Boudette, a licensed psychologist and instructor at Jefferson University Hospital’s Mindfulness Institute, suggests additional individual practice for those who can’t afford more frequent group classes.

“The classes are a way for people to learn what’s helpful for them, but doing a little bit each day is more helpful than once every two weeks,” said Boudette, who worked for 14 years at Counseling and Psychological Services at Princeton University, where she founded the Mind Body Health Services Team.

Boudette said she saw many Princeton students who had physical problems, such as gastrointestinal issues and insomnia, resulting from stress and anxiety. Yoga helps reduce stress and related issues by decreasing the activity of the nervous system, she said.

Yoga can reduce stress because it touches on meditation, mindfulness and breathing, as well as physical poses, said Biz Magarity, founder of the Nava Yoga Center, a Philadelphia yoga studio that partners with orthopedic surgeons to treat mental and physical components of injuries.

She emphasized the benefit of using yoga to gain self-awareness.

“Part of yoga is really a practice of yourself,” Magarity said. “It’s a way to empower individuals to see what works for them.”

PHOTO FEATURE

A TOUR OF COUNSELING AND PSYCHOLOGICAL SERVICES Counseling and Psychological Services is the counseling center at Penn. Offering free and confidential services for students, CAPS provides a range of services including individual therapy, group therapy, personal wellness workshops and referral services. Despite all of the discussion surrounding mental health resources on campus in recent months, only about 15 percent of students regularly step into the offices of CAPS. We decided to take this opportunity to explore CAPS and give students a better idea of what goes on in the CAPS office.

ANANYA CHANDRA | PHOTO MANAGER

Immediately upon entering the office, visitors encounter a waiting area and check-in desk. The CAPS office is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Mondays and Fridays, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays and 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturdays. Parents and insurance companies are not notified when students visit CAPS.

KATHARINE COCHERL | CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

The CAPS office is located a few blocks north of Penn’s main campus, at 3624 Market Street, 1st Floor West. After entering the main building from Market Street, the CAPS center is on the right, past the security desk.

MONA LEE | CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

After checking in, students can wait in the waiting area — which is filled with various flyers of resources to students, coloring books and tissues. Walk-ins are seen on the same day, and after an initial consultation, students can determine the next steps they want to take.

Hours: 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. Monday and Friday 9 a.m. – 7 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday 10 a.m. – 3 p.m. Saturday

ANANYA CHANDRA | PHOTO MANAGER

Moving past the waiting area, the back hallways of the CAPS facility are lined with the numerous offices of the professional resources available to MONA LEE | CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER students — including psychiatrists, psychologists, nurse practitioners and social workers. Some of these rooms are specifically designated as group therapy rooms and include more chairs to allow for larger groups.

MONA LEE | CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Each office is decorated by the individual professional, but typically includes a desk, as well as more comfortable seating area where therapy sessions happen. Therapy is currently offered in English, Spanish, Cantonese and Mandarin.

ANANYA CHANDRA | PHOTO MANAGER

Hanging in the waiting area of the CAPS office is a quilt made by CAPS office personnel. Every year, the professionals at CAPS work on different projects throughout the year to help “de-stress” during lunch breaks and at other times. In 2014, their art won a quilting award in Texas.

ANANYA CHANDRA | PHOTO MANAGER

Dr. William Alexander is the director of CAPS. He has been the director since 2009.

THEDP.COM | THE DAILY PENNSYLVANIAN

How student groups respond to tragedies

Some offer ‘personnel hours’ in place of events NADIA GOLDMAN Contributing Reporter

When emotionally stressful incidents strike Penn, student group leaders must try their best to help their members. This often means deciding whether or not to cancel meetings or offer alternative events to support members, as well as negotiating between putting up a strong front or openly discussing their vulnerabilities — all while processing the traumatic news themselves.

College senior and Chi Omega sorority Personnel Chair Carol Sandoval said that in response to student deaths and natural disasters, such as Hurricane Irma, she has held personnel hours for members to speak with her in groups or one-on-one.

When Wharton senior Henry Rogers died earlier this month, Sandoval held personnel hours in place of the sorority’s weekly chapter meeting. Members of Chi O also brought breakfast to the members of Rogers’ fraternity, Beta Theta Pi. Beta member and Wharton sophomore Emilio Torres-Hamlin said after Rogers’ death, the chapter held a meeting that lasted almost three hours. Many students in the fraternity left campus to spend time together at a member’s house, and scheduled social events in the following weeks were canceled.

Torres-Hamlin said spending time with other members during that period was extremely valuable.

“It’s very difficult dealing with something like that by yourself, having to deal with it internally,” he said. “But when you’re with a group of people like that, we were with each other for days on end, and it was just really helpful.”

International Affairs Association board member and Wharton

NEWS 7

MONDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2017

junior Matt Simon said his fraternity, Sigma Alpha Mu, rushed to support Beta members after Rogers’ death. Members of Sigma Alpha Mu, known as “Sammy,” delivered flowers to the Beta house.

Earlier in the semester, College senior Nicholas Moya, who was a member of Sammy, died by suicide in his residence off campus.

“If any group is going to be there for [Beta], it should be [Sammy],” Simon said.

After Moya’s death, the Sammy house was filled with alumni and current members, but Simon said it was important for him to reach out to IAA members who were also affected. The IAA board decided to reach out to younger members offering support, but did not change their meeting schedule.

College junior Max Schechter, a peer counselor for student-run counseling group Penn Benjamins, said maintaining a regular meeting schedule following a traumatic event can help students maintain a sense of normalcy.

“In times of tragedy, it’s important for student groups to acknowledge it, but also to have a sense of normalcy,” he said. “If everything was canceled after a tragedy, I don’t know how much easier that would make it. A lot of times, people like to cope by distracting themselves and student groups and being involved in your passions is a great way to do that.”

Student leaders said they also reach out after events that might make members feel uncertain or fearful.

Sandoval, who was the chair of admissions for the Latinx Coalition last year, said that cultural groups had a strong reaction to an incident in November 2016 when black freshmen students were added to a GroupMe that contained racially explicit threats.

“As one of the sister cultural houses in ARCH, La Casa Latina was very supportive and we hosted several workshops on how to combat these issues and how to be

there for one another as people of color,” Sandoval said. “As minorities on this campus, it was very important to show that solidarity within our communities.”

The GroupMe incident came only days after the 2016 presidential election, when President Donald Trump’s upset victory over Hillary Clinton shocked many at Penn and elsewhere. In the days following Trump’s victory, some professors canceled classes and postponed exams — many expressing concern for students’ mental and physical well-being after a long, drawn-out election night.

Queer Student Alliance Communication Chair and College sophomore Amber Auslander said after the election, QSA held an extended discussion on how the Trump administration’s policies “could affect individual lives going forward.”

Payal Sharma, a visiting lecturer in the Wharton School who studies how stressors impact leaders and teams, said leaders should talk with members about what they would find most helpful, and emphasized the value of “cultivat[ing] meaningful, genuine ties.” Sharma added that leaders should consider the signals they send to members after difficult events.

“Sometimes I think the broader question becomes, ’What do we expect of our leaders?’” she said.

“Do we want them to be strong and fearless when it comes to these events and the aftermath?

But then I think, on the other hand, do we want our leaders to be bulletproof and to convey that we can continue as if everything’s fine?

And I don’t know that it’s an either/or decision — I think it might be a balance of both.”

“I tend to think that there’s some value in leaders accepting their own vulnerability,” she said.

“That’s how you form a connection to other people, and maybe that’s how you offer support.”

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THE DAILY PENNSYLVANIAN | THEDP.COM

university university square square a complete list retailers visit visit for aforcomplete listofof retailers, ucnet.com/universitysquare bit.ly/upennretail

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Ann Taylorann Lofttaylor loft 120 S. 36th133 St.SOUTH 36th ST. at&t mobility AT&T Mobility 3741 WALNUT ST. 3741 Walnut St. bluemercury Bluemercury 3603 WALNUT ST. 3603 Walnut St. cvs Computer Connection 3401 WALNUT ST. 3601 Walnut St. eyeglass encounters CVS 4002 CHESTNUT ST. 3401 Walnut St. the gap 3925 Walnut 3401St. WALNUT ST. Eyeglass Encounters hello world 4002 Chestnut St. 3610 SANSOM ST. Hello World house of our own 3610 Sansom 3920St. SPRUCE ST. House of Our Ownword bookshop last 3920 Spruce 220St. SOUTH 40th ST. Last Word Bookstore modern eye 220 S. 40th3401 St. WALNUT ST Modern Eyenatural shoe store 226 St. SOUTH 40th ST. 3419 Walnut penn book center Natural Shoe 226 S. 40th130 St.SOUTH 34th ST.

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3606 Chestnut St. 3929 Sansom St. doc magrogan’s metropolitan Metropolitan Bakery bakery BRYSI 4013 WALNUT ST. oyster 233 S. 33rd St. house 4013 Walnut St. 3432 SANSOM ST. NOM RAMEN Cavanaugh’s Tavern New DeckNOM Tavern 3401 WALNUT ST. dunkin 119 S. 39th St. donuts 3408 Sansom St. 3437 WALNUT ST. o’ChattoPHILLY PRETZEL factory Cosi PHILLY IS federal 3608 Chestnut St.NUTS 140 S. 36th St. donuts 3428 SANSOM ST. 3734 SPRUCE ST. Dunkin Donuts Philly Pretzel Factory fresh 3437 Walnut St. grocer Philly isPOD Nuts!

4001 WALNUT ST. 3636 SANSOM ST. Federal Donuts 3734 Spruce St. gia pronto QDOBA POD Restaurant 3428 Sansom St. 3736 SPRUCE ST. 230 SOUTH 40TH ST. Greek Lady 3636 Sansom St. greek lady QUIZNOS 222 S. 40th Qdoba 3401 WALNUT ST. 222St. SOUTH 40th ST. St. Hip City Vegharvest seasonal grill 230 S. 40th SALADWORKS 214 S. 40th St. Saxbys Coffee 3728 SPRUCE ST. & wine bar honeygrow200 SOUTH 40th ST. 4000 Locust St. COFFEE SAXBYS 3731 walnut st.

Smokey Joe’s 4000 LOCUST ST. hip city veg 210 S. 40th St. JOE’S HubBub Coffee 214 SOUTH 40th ST. SMOKEY 200 SOUTH 40TH ST. Wawa 3736 Spruce St. coffee hubbub kitchen gia3736 SPRUCE ST. 3604 Chestnut St. TACO BELL 3401 WALNUT ST. 3716 spruce st.

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This destination district includes over 100 businesses, cultural and recreational venues, and public spaces in and around This penn’s destination district over 100 businesses, cultural and recreational venues,between and public in and around campus, alongincludes the tree-lined blocks of chestnut, walnut and spruce streets 30thspaces and 40th streets. penn’s campus, along the tree-lined blocks of chestnut, walnut and spruce streets between 30th and 40th streets.

THEDP.COM | THE DAILY PENNSYLVANIAN

NEWS 9

MONDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2017

70 years of changes in Penn’s mental health policies First mental health task force was formed after 9/11 MICHEL LIU Staff Reporter

Over the past three years, mental health has become one of the most important issues on Penn’s campus. Students have set up a range of mental health advocacy groups, which consistently work to improve mental wellness, whether that means calling for more comprehensive resources, or working to change Penn’s “hyper-competitive,” pre-professional culture.

But while many students today will recognize mental health as one of the perennial topics of conversation within the student body and between students and the administration, few will know Penn’s long history with the issue. To provide some context for where the University stands today, The Daily Pennsylvanian put together a

1955

1989-1990

2012

MAR. 2014

FEB. 2015

AUG. 2016

SHS creates the Mental Health Clinic to diagnose and meet the mental health treatment needs of Penn students.

Seven Penn students die, three of whom by suicide.

Students criticize the counseling services as “inadequate at best.”

After a record number of students visiting CAPS, members of the Penn community begin to question if the service has enough resources and staff members to meet student needs.

Students organize a rally on College Green calling on the University to improve CAPS resources.

The mental health task force releases its findings, proposing four ways Penn can improve resources.

The reconvened mental health task force agrees that Penn's mental health resources are on track to address student concerns.

1959 Penn introduces a confidential counseling service for “those who need counseling by professional people … but are reluctant to seek psychiatric care."

APR. 2016

FEB. 2014

2002

After four student deaths within several weeks, Penn expands CAPS resources and forms a task force on Student Psychological Health and Welfare.

Penn convenes the Mental Health Outreach Task Force to address student needs in the wake of 9/11.

JAN. 2015 CAPS relocates to 3624 Market St. from 36th and Walnut streets.

Following the death of Wharton junior Olivia Kong, Gutmann and Price reconvene the mental health task force.

That same month, the University changes its notification policy so that when an undergraduate student dies, all undergraduates are informed, rather than just selected groups.

JULIA SCHORR | DESIGN EDITOR

timeline of the major decisions that have shaped mental health at Penn.

While there was a series of student deaths by suicide in the early 1990s, and a development

of

a mental health task force — Penn’s very first — in 2001

following 9/11, Penn’s student body and administration only seemed to start taking big, ac-

tive strides towards improving mental wellness on campus in the past four to five years.

Federal health care cuts unlikely to threaten Penn student access Prof. says student insurance will not be affected KELLY HEINZERLING Deputy News Editor

As the Trump administration continues to undermine and take apart the Affordable Care Act, students are beginning to question how potential changes in federal health care laws may affect their access to both physical and mental health care.

On Oct. 6, the Trump administration announced it would enact a religious exemption for companies and insurers that have religious objections to covering contraception costs in their health care plans. And on Oct. 12, Trump signed an executive order making association health plans and short-term health plans

accessible to more people. This could make “cheaper plans with skimpier benefits more available,” with the result of creating “more loopholes for more people to buy insurance outside the health care law’s markets,” reported Vox.com.

These attempts to deconstruct the ACA aren’t likely to be the last from the Trump administration.

Orders like these place several key aspects of the ACA at risk, such as the ability for individuals to remain on their parents’ health care plans until they reach the age of 26, as well as the expansion of Medicaid under the Obama administration, which made mental health care resources available to patients who were not previously been able to afford it.

But Trevor Hadley, a professor

of psychology in psychiatry at the Perelman School of Medicine, said the Trump administration’s recent changes to reproductive care covered by the ACA are unlikely to extend to insurance that protects mental health resources.

While Trump’s executive power allows him to change policies surrounding contraceptives, mental health insurance is a fundamental part of the ACA that could not be altered by any action taken by the Executive Branch.

Other bills such as the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, passed in 2008 independent of the ACA, provide additional protection to mental health care. The bill links mental health coverage to medical and surgical services coverage and requires that health care plans cover both to the same extent.

On Penn’s campus, any federal changes to health care are also unlikely to affect students’ access to mental health care because of the structure of student insurance plans.

“Very little of what Penn offers is dependent on the ACA,” Hadley said.

He added that as long as the ACA stays in place without being entirely overhauled, “most people will continue to have mental health insurance.”

Penn requires students to sign up for either public or private health insurance that covers mental health. Penn’s private Penn Student Insurance Plan, which covers 22 percent of undergraduates, 43 percent of graduate students and 51 percent of professional students, also covers mental health care.

Additionally, Counseling and Psychological Services at Penn offers free mental health care that is not dependent on student insurance. "[Changes are] not going to affect people in the college age bracket,” Research Professor of Psychiatry at the Perelman School of Medicine Aileen Rothbard said. “I don’t see that mental health care benefits will be affected right now in any specific way.”

“Mental health is not being specifically targeted, like some of the other issues,” Rothbard added.

Students at Penn who receive mental health care coverage through the ACA Medicaid expansions, however, might be affected by health care act repeals.

“If Medicaid was repealed

along with the rest of ACA, that could be a pretty big blow to mental health care,” assistant professor of Health Care Management Atul Gupta said, explaining that Medicaid health care funds a large portion of mental health care nationally.

Students who receive health care through Medicaid, rather than through the Penn Student Insurance Plan or a parent’s private plan, might see changes in their access to mental health care if any proposed ACA rollbacks are enacted.

Hadley added that in Philadelphia alone, nearly 700,000 individuals receive health care coverage through Medicaid. If rollbacks occur, people on Medicaid will not only lose mental health coverage; they will lose their coverage entirely.

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MONDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2017

THE DAILY PENNSYLVANIAN | THEDP.COM

Penn Wellness gets a $2,500 increase in budget Initiatives include combatting eating disorders KATIE BONTJE Staff Reporter

Penn Wellness, the umbrella organization for wellness groups on campus, has received a budget of $10,500 from the Vice Provost for University Life for the 2017-2018 academic year, said College senior and Chair of Penn Wellness Kathryn Dewitt This is an increase from the $8,000 budget they received last year.

With its budget, the Penn Wellness board said it has been able to fund four times the number of initiatives compared to previous years, largely because of an increase in awareness of the funds, which are available through the Common Funding Application.

The Application, which Penn Wellness implemented at the beginning of 2017, allows constituent groups to apply for funding.

“The grant was given by VPUL to enhance mental health programming and initiatives on campus – by students, for students,” founder of

Penn Wellness and 2016 College and Engineering graduate Ben Bolnick said. “Before the grant was given, groups had to find funding from other sources.”

College senior and Penn Wellness Treasurer Kelly Gao said the group is reserving a large portion of its grant for next semester, which will feature large-scale initiatives such as the Mental Wellness Week in April.

However, this has not stopped the group from using the grant to provide resources for several new organizations such as Project Help Eat Accept and Live and Project Let’s Erase The Stigma, both of which were established this semester. The funding has also helped groups expand existing projects, and allowed individual students to take on projects promoting mental wellness.

College sophomore Rylee Park and College and Engineering sophomore Lauren Drake are co-founders of Penn’s Project LETS chapter.

They were both funded by the wellness grant to travel to Brown University over fall break for the Project LETS inaugural conference.

“In general, we aim to build a

peer support network among people with lived experience of mental illness or neurodivergent condition,” Park said.

Drake added that they hope to implement a peer mental health advocate program at Penn, through which students with shared identities or experiences with mental health can be paired together for the long term as a support system.

Project HEAL is an international organization that aims to provide resources for people to treat their eating disorders.

“I’ve always thought that Penn doesn’t have much awareness or discussion about eating disorders or body positivity,” said College junior and founder of Penn’s chapter of Project HEAL Mariya Bershad.

She added that she found this “surprising” because eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of all mental illnesses.

Bershad said Project HEAL is also in the process of writing a “Wellness Guide” to help students struggling with eating disorders access the resources on campus that are available to help them.

Penn Wellness funding also goes

into financing CogWell training, a program designed to help Penn students understand and improve their mental wellness. Experts in mental health, including Penn psychiatrists and professors, lead these sessions.

This year, CogWell is working with groups like the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity to implement smaller “mini trainings” focused on active listening across the Greek Life community, said CogWell President and College senior Emily Marucci.

The wellness grant has also gone towards helping individual students implement ideas they have to improve Penn’s culture around mental health.

College senior Serena Bian has been holding “space gatherings” since she was a sophomore, and this semester, the wellness grant will help her organize them.

Bian said these gatherings are meant for “random” members of the Penn community to come together and combat “emotional isolation.”

This year she applied for funding through the Common Funding Application — and was successful.

For the most recent gathering, held on Oct. 1, food and transportation

JULIA SCHORR | DESIGN EDITOR

were paid for by the wellness grant, and an Airbnb was covered by the

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MONDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2017

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MONDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2017

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NEWS 13

Our campus. Our mental health.

Why some Penn students have to grieve alone

There is no standardized CAPS referral process

Administrators reach out to affected students inconsistently

CAPS claims students decide when to end their treatment

REBECCA TAN Senior News Editor

When former College student Aran Rana of the Class of 2019 died in Hong Kong this year, his closest friends found out in the same way and at the same time that over 10,000 other undergraduates did: five paragraphs in an email notification from the University.

College junior Navya Dasari was in a study room in the Biomedical Library when a friend showed her the email on Rana’s death. College junior Colin Lodewick, who is the 34th Street Magazine arts editor, was in an English class when the notification popped up. Together with Rana’s three housemates — College juniors Naomi Elegant,Meerie Jesuthasan and Jessica Zuo — Lodewick and Dasari learned of his death at exactly 2:22 p.m. that day.

All these students had been close friends with Rana since they were freshmen, but none of them received news of his death from Penn prior to that school-wide email.

In the weeks and months following that announcement, no Penn administrators proactively reached out to them offering support.

Lodewick discovered several days after the announcement of Rana’s death that the obituary for Rana in the Penn Almanac, the University’s journal for faculty and staff, inaccurately attributed a quote to Rana’s mother instead his father. The Almanac wrote that “Mr. Rana’s mother said he would be remembered for his ‘friendliness, kindness and his vivaciousness.’” It was in fact Rana’s father, Aditya Rana, who made that statement.

“This, maybe, really epitomizes how little Penn really dug into the issue,” Lodewick said.

A "postvention" refers to an intervention conducted within a community after a death by suicide. On university campuses, administrators typically take charge of this process, and at Penn, various departments, from the Division of Public Safety to Student Intervention Services, are involved.

In an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian, the Vice Provost for University Life Valarie Swain-Cade McCoullum said that since the early 1990s, Penn has worked to follow a standard series of steps following any student death. Following the miscommunication of former Wharton junior Olivia Kong’s death in 2016, Penn administrators also worked with students to make the postvention process more consistent across different incidents.

But despite these efforts, Cade conceded there are instances where Penn does not, or is unable to, follow this standard protocol.

The experiences of Lodewick, Dasari and their friends bear this out.

VPUL policy states that once a student death is reported to the University, the Penn Police Department is supposed to work closely with SIS, the Office of the Chaplain and departments under VPUL to notify and support students connected to the deceased.

But in some cases, these departments do not end up locating those in need of support.

“One of the challenges that we have is, how do we find out who are close community members to a student?” Cade said.

Rana’s closest friends received nearly no

help from Penn, but friends of Kong and of College senior Nicholas Moya, who died in August this year, did. Cade emphasized that administrators have continually worked to improve the postvention process. But for some students, this doesn’t erase the experiences that have left them feeling forgotten by their school during a time of extreme distress.

“I needed support that Penn wasn’t able to offer,” Lodewick said, adding that from the time of Rana’s death until today, he has never felt that Penn was aware he had lost a friend.

“I felt very alone in my grief,” Dasari added. “And I feel part of that was the way Penn’s administration and community didn’t really react to what happened. I just felt alone.”

The inconsistencies in the postvention process across three incidents In a document supplied to the DP, VPUL laid out 10 policy points for Penn’s postvention process. Once Penn receives news of a student death, the first course of action is to reach out to the student’s family, then to find and notify the student’s closest friends before sending out a general email to the student body.

There is “a very intentional effort to do personal outreach,” VPUL spokesperson Monica Yant Kinney said, though the experiences of some students suggest this isn’t always successful.

None of Rana’s closest friends knew about his death prior to the school-wide email. In contrast, when Moya died on Aug. 31, various high-level administrators were actively involved in the postvention process hours before the rest of the undergraduate population was notified.

The Friday after Moya’s death, Cade, Director of the Office of Fraternity and Sorority Life Eddie Banks-Crosson, Associate Vice Provost for Student Affairs Hikaru Kozuma, University Chaplain Rev. Chaz Howard and several representatives from Counseling and Psychological Services proactively went to the fraternity house of Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity, where Moya was a member, said Sammy President and Wharton junior Ethan Volk.

They brought pizza, talked to students and stayed from a little past midnight to 2 a.m. Cade also worked closely with members of the fraternity to craft the email that was later sent to all undergraduates at 9:37 a.m.

In the weeks after Rana’s death, most of his closest friends had no interaction with administrators. College junior and Daily Pennsylvanian Contributing Reporter Naomi Elegant, one of Rana’s housemates, received an email from SIS arranging to pick up Rana’s belongings, but was not contacted by staff from either SIS or any other administrative department offering support.

Among Rana’s friends, Dasari was the only exception. Even then, it was not a designated administrator but her academic advisor who reached out after seeing a post that Dasari had made on Facebook.

“I recognize that if I didn’t see that, I wouldn’t have known,” said Jamie-Lee Josselyn, Dasari’s advisor and the associate director for recruitment for the Creative Writing Program, who is also a 2005 College graduate. “I think it comes down to a little bit of chance and the choice that I’ve made

SARAH FORTINSKY News Editor

CAMILLE RAPAY | DESIGN EDITOR

“I felt very alone in my grief … And I feel part of that was the way Penn’s administration and community didn’t really react to what happened. I just felt alone.”

- Navya Dasari

CAMILLE RAPAY | DESIGN EDITOR

as an advisor to connect to my students in a slightly more informal manner.”

Josselyn reached out to the College Office, which then informed Dasari’s professors about what had happened and made arrangements that allowed her to cope academically.

“I really needed that support,” Dasari said. “Without that, I would have taken time off or … I don’t know how I would have survived.” She added that when it came to support from Penn, she felt like she “got lucky” among her friends affected by Rana’s death.

By student accounts, the postvention conducted after the deaths of Moya and Kong were markedly different than what friends of Rana experienced.

When Kong died in April 2016, most of her close friends received multiple messages from different administrative departments, said 2016 Wharton and Engineering graduate Calvin Nguyen, who was a member of Phi Gamma Nu, the business fraternity that Kong was in. He said he personally remembered various emails from CAPS and VPUL over the five weeks following Kong’s death.

Similarly, in the days following Moya’s passing, a range of administrators worked to support those affected, Volk said. BanksCrosson and Kozuma regularly checked in with members of Sammy via phone or email, while SIS Director Sharon Smith personally helped the fraternity organize the memorial for Moya on campus and arranged for four to five Penn transit buses to drive students to and from Moya’s funeral in Broomall, Pa. Administrators also ensured that all Sammy members were placed on a list that was circulated among administrators and faculty who would be made aware of the students personally connected to Moya.

Members of Sigma Delta Tau sorority, which has close ties to Sammy, were also placed on that list, SDT President and College senior Liz Heit said. Soon after Moya’s death, various members of the sorority received an email from the College Office offering to help them with any challenges they were facing academically.

College junior Meerie Jesuthasan, one of Rana’s housemates, a former 34th Street Magazine writer and a former Daily Pennsylvanian opinion columnist, said having to independently send emails to all her faculty, her therapist at CAPS and all her other peers almost made her feel like she was “networking.”

“It was super tiring, having to do that labor,” she said. Reacting to the list of affected students that administrators disseminated following Moya’s death, Jesuthasan said, “Wow — that’s … that is so much of what I wish I had.”

“I think it spoke volumes about the Greek community that we had a lot of support and visibility from administration,” Heit said. “I think it highlights some of the good things about being in Greek life, but of course, it also highlights negative things, and the separation between the Greek community and the larger campus community.”

Why some postventions are different from others

To friends of Rana, Penn’s treatment of his death felt markedly different from other postventions, which they said is likely because of the circumstances surrounding his death.

News of Rana’s passing came two days before spring break. He died while on a leave of absence, and had only spent a little over a year on Penn’s campus before leaving for home in Hong Kong.

In contrast, both Moya and Kong had been upperclassmen deeply embedded in recognized student groups. Moya died two days after the first day of classes in his offcampus residence, and Kong died in the middle of the spring semester at the 40th Street Station on SEPTA’s Market-Frankford line — blocks away from Penn buildings.

Many of these are arbitrary factors, but can significantly affect the way Penn is able to respond. A majority of the University’s postvention efforts are designed to provide in-person support, Cade said, explaining perhaps why so many administrators were streaming in and out of the Sammy house in the early hours following Moya’s death, while friends of Rana felt like they had been forgotten by the University over spring break.

Administrators also seem better-equipped to provide support for the friends of a student in a structured social network such as a fraternity or a recognized student group.

Following Moya’s death, one of the first people Volk communicated with was OFSL Director Eddie Banks-Crosson. Similarly, Heit said she was primarily working with an OFSL representative to coordinate administrative support for her sorority.

Administrators want to provide students affected by the death of a friend with the same support that Heit and Volk experienced, but student accounts show that they haven't been able to achieve that. Despite the stated goals and policies of these administrative departments, Penn has left some students grieving alone.

“It seemed like Penn was taking advantage of the fact that [Rana] was on a leave of absence to make it seem like they didn’t have to do that much in terms of following up on his death,” Lodewick said. “It seemed like it was something Penn could just sweep away.”

Is Penn's timeline for postvention long enough?

Another aspect of the postvention process that students hope to change is its timeframe.

Following Kong’s death, administrators stopped checking in with affected students after about four to five weeks, Nguyen said, adding that the repercussions of having a close friend die by suicide aren't likely to end after that time period. Lodewick and Jesuthasan agreed, adding that it can take months or years to process the loss they experienced.

“I think about it everyday,” Nguyen said.

“Some days are really bad; some days are better, but it’s something that lasts more than a few weeks. I don’t think it ever goes away.”

“It’d be very helpful, I think, for administration to follow up,” he said.

When she experienced a relapse in her anxiety symptoms last fall, College junior Ariel Epstein decided to visit Counseling and Psychological Services.

Crippling panic attacks would strike at random, just as they used to in high school, and Epstein concluded that it was time for her to seek help. She set up weekly meetings with a therapist and soon started seeing a CAPS psychiatrist who prescribed her medication.

Epstein finished the year feeling better than she had been, but when she attempted to schedule another appointment with CAPS after the summer ended, she was pushed to move off-campus and to seek help from outside providers — a process that CAPS calls "the referral process." This was the first time Epstein had learned that she would not be able to receive long-term treatment.

“My understanding, because no one ever told me anything differently, was, ‘OK, when you come back in three months [after the summer], you’ll maybe have a quick check-in and then get another refill,’” Epstein said, adding that she felt like she had been blindsided by the referrals.

Approximately 15 percent of all students who visit CAPS are referred to an outside provider, said CAPS Director Bill Alexander. Usually, the referral happens after brief treatment at Penn, but sometimes students can be referred at their initial consultation. Some students also contact CAPS specifically requesting a referral.

CAPS resources have expanded in the past few years, but student accounts suggest that resources at CAPS still aren't enough to serve the undergraduate and graduate population at Penn. Alexander estimated that an average of 20 percent of undergraduate students and 16 percent of graduate students receive treatment from CAPS in an academic year. This adds up to roughly 3,836 students who are supported by 45 clinical staff members at CAPS. Because of the high volume of students in need of treatment, Alexander said the department often has to "practice a brief form of treatment here, just so that everybody gets in the door."

These limitations result in experiences like Epstein's, who said she felt confused by the referral system.

The CAPS website writes that students

"make the final decision about whether or not they can work with a particular outside provider.” But various other sources from CAPS, including Alexander, CAPS Deputy Director Michal Saraf and CAPS representatives who interacted with various students, all seem to disagree on what the exact rules for the referral process are.

Why are there no standardized policies for the referral process?

In a series of email threads and phone calls exchanged between Epstein, her parents, her CAPS therapist Meghan Sullivan and Saraf, Epstein's request for ongoing treatment from CAPS was resoundingly rejected. Epstein said during one of these phone calls, Saraf yelled, “‘We never promised you long-term care,’” which made her feel “ambushed.”

“There was absolutely no convincing [Saraf],” Epstein said. “It was like she knew how that conversation was going to go before she got on the phone.”

Saraf declined to comment on these allegations.

Alexander said the reason for this confusion among stakeholders is that there are no formalized rules on the referral system at CAPS. He explained that mental health is situational and something that should not be left up to formalized rules, particularly when it comes to the decision of whether to point a student towards the referral process.

“Some students just say, ‘No, I don’t want to,'” Alexander said. “We’re not going to get in an argument with them.

We’re going to suggest it. We’re going to strongly suggest it, but we’re not going to argue with you about it. If you’re going to refuse to go, you’re not going to get kicked out of CAPS.” But this message does not seem to be clearly communicated to members of the Penn community like Epstein.

“The letter of the law with their policy is, ‘We’re not gonna make you do anything you’re uncomfortable with,’ but that doesn’t matter when the practice is they coerce people into doing things they’re uncomfortable with anyway because [students] don’t think they have a choice,” Epstein said.

When do CAPS staffers notify students?

There are several different points in their interactions with CAPS when students can be notified that they will not be receiving long-term treatment with Penn.

According to student accounts, however, these conversations rarely give the impression that students can push back against the referral process or opt to con-

ANANYA CHANDRA | PHOTO MANAGER

CAPS Director Bill Alexander estimated that an average of 20 percent of undergraduate students and 16 percent of graduate students receive treatment each year.

“There are no rules because it’s a clinical situation.

It’s not policy or procedures, but the clinical [professional] is making the judgment.”

- Bill Alexander

tinue treatment with Penn. Alexander acknowledged that although this conversation "is inherently a hierarchical situation,” it is important that students feel comfortable speaking out when they're not satisfied.

The conversation on the referral process can happen at an initial consultation, which can be conducted by a wide range of CAPS employees.

“There isn’t anything that clinicians are supposed to say,” Alexander said. “There are no rules because it’s a clinical situation. It’s not policy or procedures, but the clinical [professional] is making the judgment.”

CAPS Referral Coordinator Nicole Nardone said she conducts preliminary consultations where she makes a point of telling students that CAPS can’t provide long-term treatment, but noted that she does not know if other CAPS staff also mention it at the initial consultation. Student accounts suggest that many don't.

College junior Yoni Gottlieb said his therapist at CAPS only told him that CAPS wouldn't provide him with longterm treatment during his second session.

At that point, he had already opened up about personal experiences that were difficult for him to discuss at first and said he wished he had been notified of this policy earlier.

“If I were someone who had just learned all this information, I wouldn’t go to CAPS at all. It sounds really confusing,” Gottlieb said. “I can’t trust a place

that has therapists that might cut you off, might not cut you off.” He added that even today, when other people ask him about setting up an appointment with CAPS, Gottlieb tells them to go straight to the referral process without setting up an initial consultation session.

Gottlieb’s current therapist is based in Colorado, where he is from, and he currently communicates with his therapist exclusively via phone or FaceTime.

But administrators said they also try to follow up with students after they are referred out of CAPS. A month after providing students with information about local providers, Nardone said she reaches out to students over email to check whether they have made an appointment with an outside provider.

Nardone said she uses the email, which asks for information on the providers, to update her list of recommended providers.

The average response rate to the email is 30 percent among students referred out each month, Alexander said. But for those who do not respond to the email, there is typically no other attempt to contact them, Alexander said.

“We like to believe that if they’re unhappy, they’ll really get back to us," he added.

How does the referral system affect the quality of care at CAPS? The referral system and the nature of CAPS as a short-term facility also has wider implications on the quality of care that it offers, students say. While the purpose of therapy is often to address underlying mental illnesses, many students describe the treatment at CAPS as focused on crisis management and on transitioning students out of CAPS. After College sophomore Eliza Halpin was hospitalized following a suicide attempt at the start of the second semester of her freshman year, she sought help at CAPS. Throughout the entire semester, she wanted to work on her depression and devise coping mechanisms, but her therapy at CAPS seemed to remain focused on her suicide attempt in January instead of on her long-term recovery, Halpin said. “[The focus was on] basically how to make sure nothing happened like that so Penn didn’t look bad,” Halpin said. “The focus was basically like, ‘Is this gonna happen again? Okay, no? Then you’re good.’”

Gottlieb echoed that sentiment.

“It felt like, ‘Oh, we have CAPS here because we need to have it, but we’re just going to refer you to someone else and it’s not really on our hands,” he said.

Psychiatric medication is often necessary, but expensive 20 percent of Penn is prescribed drugs by CAPS OLIVIA SYLVESTER Senior Reporter

When Wharton and Nursing junior Sydney Liu first started seeing a therapist at Counseling and Psychological Services, she was pushed not to take medication for what she felt was a worsening condition of anxiety.

Her therapist was not authorized to prescribe medication, but Liu pushed for a referral to a psychiatrist within CAPS and was prescribed Zoloft, an anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medication, about a year ago.

Liu is among the approximately 20 percent of students at Penn who are prescribed medication from CAPS to manage their mental health. While these students say that their prescriptions are essential to managing their health at Penn, they recognize that there are often financial or logistical barriers that prevent others from gaining access to this resource. “[Medication] really help[ed] me untangle a lot of the internal issues I was having,” Liu said. “The way that it really worked for me was that it raised the threshold for which I would start panicking. I would have less panic attacks day-to-day or when things got stressful.”

College freshman Jamie Albrecht has been taking Lexapro for depression daily for the past two months after receiving a prescription from a local psychiatrist outside of CAPS. Albrecht said he was not on medication before he entered Penn as a freshman, but has struggled with depression for a long time.

YOSEF ROBELE | STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Bill Alexander, the director of CAPS, said the department tends to use behavioral interventions such as psychotherapy more often than it uses medication.

“Penn is just really demanding,” Albrecht said. “Being un-medicated when you have [a mental health issue] here is just really difficult.”

Bill Alexander, the director of CAPS, said the department tends to use behavioral interventions such as psychotherapy more often than it uses medication. He estimated that approximately 20 percent or less of students treated by CAPS are prescribed medication.

“What we have learned here at the Counseling Center is that for very mild mood instability and mild depressions, psychotherapy is just as effective, if not more effective, than medications,” Alexander said.

Forbes reported last year that, while research supporting the benefits of behavioral therapy has grown, the helpfulness of antidepressants has been placed under increasing doubt.

Alexander said CAPS determines every student’s need for medication on a case-

"You’re allowed to have emotions [at Penn], but there is a caveat — you’re still expected to do everything and be fully functional."

- Jamie Albrecht

by-case basis and prescribes medication through its own psychiatrists. He added that students with depression or anxiety disorders can benefit from medication.

“Most students can take them without any serious side effects,” Alexander said. “Certainly they are much more able to participate successfully in their academics on the medicine than off the medicine.”

Students who are prescribed medication from CAPS often have different experiences with them, Alexander said.

“Each medicine is slightly different and people respond to them differently,” he said.

“It’s tailor-made, you could say.”

Albrecht agreed, adding that medication is not a “cure-all.” During the first few weeks after starting Lexapro, Albrecht said he actually felt more tired and more depressed, which is one of the side effects of the drug.

He also said that it can be hard as a student to make time for regular therapy sessions. Albrecht said that one time, he forgot to pick up his prescription for three days because he was overwhelmed with school.

"You’re allowed to have emotions [at Penn], but there is a caveat — you’re still expected to do everything and be fully functional," he said.

“That’s just not realistic when you have mental health issues,” Albrecht said. “You just can’t do certain things sometimes. You can try to fight against it and not let it affect you, but sometimes you can’t. At Penn, that’s not necessarily an option.”

Liu, who is on the Penn Student Insurance Plan, said one of her concerns was the cost of prescriptions and co-payments for therapy sessions. She said that, although it is “thankfully not an issue” for her, it could

definitely be a financial burden for some.

According to the outline of PSIP coverage, Penn students using a preferred provider must pay a $10 co-pay per visit for outpatient mental health services, such as therapy sessions, and a $100 co-pay for admission to inpatient services, such as psychiatric hospitals.

While a preferred health care provider has a contract with health insurance companies, a non-preferred provider does not. If students go to a non-preferred provider, students must pay 30 percent of the full bill, or the co-insurance, which can be substantially more than a co-pay. Prescription co-pays can vary from $20 to $40 per month depending on the brand and type of drug.

“It kind of bugs me that it does cost some money. Some people may not feel like spending $10 a month on this kind of stuff is the best way of spending $10,” Liu said.

“I’m just very fortunate this isn’t an issue for me, but I definitely know people and have friends who would feel like that is an extra financial burden.”

Students may also see differences in their prescriptions based on the psychiatrist to whom they are assigned. The class of medications that treat anxiety and depression are called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs. “There’s a number of different specific medications that fall into that group,” said Karin Borgmann-Winter, a psychiatrist in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. “A different psychiatrist might use different versions of those for the treatment of anxiety and depression.”

14 SPORTS

MONDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2017

THE DAILY PENNSYLVANIAN | THEDP.COM

Why the mind matters: Sports psychology in Penn Athletics Mental preparation extends past the game MOSES NSEREKO Sports Reporter

When it comes to Penn Athletics’ approach to mental wellness, the focus is not so much ‘mind over matter,’ but rather ‘mind in harmony with matter.’ “I asked coaches, ‘What percentage of [sports] is mental?’ and they all responded that it’s 35%, 50%, even 80% mental,� Dr. Joel Fish, the official sports psychologist for Penn Ahtletics, recalled. “So, if the game is largely mental, then let’s spend time during the week thinking about the mental part of the game.�

That is exactly what men’s basketball coach Steve Donahue and Dr. Joe Dowling have committed to doing. Dowling primarily works with athletes from both basketball programs to attend to the mental side of the game as well as to help with their mentality throughout everyday life. “With these kids, it’s so much stress,� Donahue said. “With handling the academics here, and, obviously, what we demand in Division I basketball, to have another adult that’s a professional in dealing with stuff that’s off the court to give them tools they can use not only in basketball, but for the rest of their life, is great.

DIGREGORIO >> BACKPAGE

first semester it had become so exhausting, so draining to be myself — making jokes, talking about the NBA to anyone that will listen, and perpetuating the conspiracy theory that Stevie Wonder isn’t really blind — on a minute to minute basis, I often felt like I needed to completely shut down at random times throughout the day. I was existing somewhere between being awake and asleep, more of a passive observer of my day to day life than an active participant.

Four. Three. Two.

What makes the partnership of Dowling and Donahue even more effective is how often their careers have intersected. The two initially met at the beginning of each of their respective careers, while Donahue was a volunteer assistant coach for the Quakers. It was then when Donahue started bringing in Dowling talk to his players on an informal basis.

This pattern continued when Donahue went on to work for the basketball programs at Cornell and Boston College. When Donahue returned to Penn basketball in a more substantial capacity, so too did Dowling, as he became the primary counseling resource for both basketball programs.

Dowling’s incentive remains the same, regardless of whether he’s meeting with the teams in team-building exercises or in a one-on-one capacity. He always tries to try prepare the athlete to perform at peak performance.

But what does it actually mean to reach peak performance?

According to Dowling, it begins with an improvement of self-treatment; he challenges his athletes to look up to themselves in the way that they look up to their peers.

Secondly, he attends to strengthening an athlete’s support system and his or her ability to communicate with coaches, teammates, and family members. Finally, he stresses the importance of pulling positive memories from past

performances. “I’m a therapist first and foremost,� the Villanova graduate said. “I don’t even like the term “sports psychologist�; there is no accountant psychology, [or] engineering psychology. I like working with athletes, but when I am working with athletes, I help them address whatever comes up.�

In terms of “whatever comes up,� Dowling asserted that it really depends on the individual. While an athlete who is comfortable with things in his or her personal life will only focus on things like basketball, Dowling made sure to address the things going on outside of the court when he sees fit.

As for the rest of Penn Athletics’

A few things happened that helped me when I got back to school for the second semester.

First, I finally started realizing that my friends here cared about me and were willing to help me out, even if that just meant walking two long blocks to Wawa when it was 10 degrees outside to get a free cup of water because they could tell sitting and doing work for hours was driving me insane. There is no discernible reason that I started noticing these things, but it was a revelation for me. Slowly, I realized, cliche as it sounds, that I didn’t have to carry this load myself.

Second, I started taking

medication for my anxiety and depression. As wary as I was that the medication would make me a personality-less zombie, I figured that’s exactly what I was at the time without it so might as well give it a try. I still take the medicine to this day and, while it is certainly no substitute for a cure, it has helped me keep things just a little bit more manageable.

If nothing else, it at least helped me to eat my heart’s desire of Hill dining hall food second semester and get myself back up to a healthy weight.

Third, and probably most importantly, I was starting to understand what it meant to be a part

of team. Being a part of a team didn’t just mean that I had the responsibility to not let everyone else down, but it meant they were going to help me live up to that responsibility.

Something that I’ve had to fall back on my whole life is sports.

The competition gives me an emotional outlet and it gives me a comfortable, illusory of control: there are rules that don’t change, clear winners and losers, right and wrong, action and consequence are right after one another, a known, common enemy, and, most of all, a team.

Clapping out my last rep in the weight room, helping me get in touch with all my professors when I had a kidney stone issue, laughing at the fact that I was 18 on my second kidney stone, and making sure I was always invited when they were going to do things — these things made me feel like I was a part of something bigger.

That team became and remains the backbone of my identity at Penn.

So, how does this article end?

Honestly, it doesn’t. Of course I still get down sometimes. I have days where it’s really difficult to get out of bed, or where it’s really difficult to eat. But those days have gotten fewer and farther in between. I still have panic attacks that make me sweat through my shirt in minutes and get my heart jamming against my chest. But those come less frequently now, and I am better at managing them when I feel them coming on. I’m still a work in progress and that’s ok.

It doesn’t end because there are other people here on campus who are still hurting too. My story is

ZACH SHELDON | SPORTS PHOTO EDITOR

Mental health and preparation have been a focus for many Penn teams including men’s basketball under coach Steve Donahue’s tenure. Sports psychologists can help make sure teams are ready.

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NEWYORKTIMESCROSSWORDPUZZLE Edited by Will Shortz Crossword Edited by Will Shortz 1

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athletes? That’s where Fish comes in.

As the official Penn Athletics sports psychologist, Fish is an accessible resource for all of Penn’s athletic programs, and his credentials only provide further context for his comprehensive approach to sports psychology at Penn. He previously consulted with the

76ers, Phillies and the Flyers.

His published work, 101 Ways to Be a Terrific Sports Parent, demonstrates the importance of not only establishing a dialogue with the student athlete but also the importance of educating and communicating with those key members of a student athlete’s support group.

What really stands out is how applicable the mental skills Fish develops with the athletes are in life. “The goal is to set up a mental skills plan to address an area where they feel like they need improvement,� Fish said. “If a player is struggling with confidence, we set up a mental skills plan with positive self-talk; if it’s pressure performance, maybe we set up a mental skills plan with relaxation.�

Positive self-talk. Relaxation.

These are skills that seem imperative to get through collegiate life, let alone life as a college athlete.

This is exactly what all three men stressed: how important it is to translate these skills off the field, and how crucial it is for those not competing in Division I athletics to execute these mental skills as well.

Whether dealing with students or student athletes, the lessons pulled from the conversations with Fish, Dowling, and Donahue remain the same: when it comes to self-nourishment and wellness, the mind always matters.

ALEX FISHER | FILE PHOTO

Penn sprint football quarterback Zack DiGregorio has dealt with mental health issues in the past — but has found ways to get by.

just one, small part of the story of mental health here on campus and for people in all kinds of other communities.

Unsurprisingly, I do not have any one step cures to the problem or any incredibly insightful policy suggestions for the administration to help deal with this problem on a large scale.

But I do think we can always try to do more in our everyday lives to just be kind to one another. It doesn’t cost any time or energy to smile at the person

walking into Van Pelt as you’re walking out. No one will ever be worse off if you tell your friends you love them just a little more often. Ask a friend how they’re doing. You may not know it, but that person might breathe a whole lot easier because of you.

One. ZACK DiGREGORIO is a College senior from Princeton, N.J., and is a quarterback on the Penn sprint football team. He can be reached at dpsports@thedp.com.

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SNOW

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through so easily deserve an outlet to discuss their experiences with who will listen. They deserve the chance to start a conversation about the factors that made their collegiate careers so difficult, a conversation that can help prevent future athletes from having the same problems. A conversation that can generate real change.

If there were significant advances in Penn Athletics’ mental health and wellness policies or initiatives since the string of suicides several years ago, you would have heard about it already. Penn Athletics has never been afraid to tout its accomplishments — or even the facades of such.

In Penn Athletics’ strategic plan, which covers the next five years through 2022, the subject of mental wellness doesn’t even appear until the eighth page of the ten-page document. The vaguely-worded commitment to making sure student-athletes are “mentally and emotionally well� is the only location in the strategic plan where mental wellness receives any attention, vastly less

highly prioritized than fundraising projects and winning championships.

By denying student-athletes the chance to speak on subjects integral to their college experiences, Penn Athletics denies them the chance to enjoy progress in their state of health and wellness.

There is much to be assessed and much to be done if Penn Athletics is to solve all of its cultural issues. But that can be framed optimistically — there’s significant room for growth. Penn’s administration realized this and initiated a Campus Conversation. There is no guarantee that progress will come of it, but its existence at all is a sign of progress itself.

The first step to solving any problem is acknowledging that there is one.

Penn Athletics can do this at any time — if only they will allow a light to shine upon it.

WILLIAM SNOW is a College junior from Nashville, Tenn., and is the senior sports editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. He can be reached at snow@thedp.com.

THEDP.COM | THE DAILY PENNSYLVANIAN

PASSIONS

>> BACKPAGE

handle team practices and games in addition to academic studies, work-study jobs, other extracurricular activities and an at least existent social life, students often come to the conclusion that a change has to be made to restructure that mental burden.

“Penn has never had a Nursing swimmer make it through all four years, and I was set on being the first one, so I was very motivated freshman year, even though I was just a walkon,” Nursing junior and former women’s swimmer Marissa Moskalow said. “But then academics have always been my priority,

too thin, and I think something had to go, and it had to be swimming, for better or for worse.”

One commonality that nearly all retired student-athletes share is that none of them are spending their newly acquired free time staring at their bedroom walls feeling sorry for themselves. At a school notorious for having its students fill every vacant second with some form of activity, former athletes are no exceptions, as they consistently find ways to use their formerly occupied 20+ hours per week to pursue new passions — though what these passions consist of varies greatly between Penn’s population.

Since leaving the swim pro-

“I was just trying to ignore the fact that I had to quit by not talking to anybody about it, but I had to face it” - Angelo Matos

and during freshman year, the pressure of keeping up with my schoolwork and making sure I was meeting my work-study hours, that all kind of got to me and swimming got pushed to the back. … I really stretched myself

SPORTS 15

MONDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2017

gram, Moskalow has increased her work-study hours within the Nursing school’s office, in addition to serving as a teaching assistant for a lab course, babysitting for nearby families, working as a research assistant

at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and becoming involved with the local “Big Brothers, Big Sisters” community service group.

For former men’s track and field javelin thrower and College junior Connor Borkert , that new passion became competitive powerlifting, where he already ranks No. 10 nationally in the 183-pound weight class in the men’s Raw Junior category (ages 19-23).

Engineering junior Angelo Matos, who walked on to Penn football as a freshman before helping sprint football to a championship as a sophomore, has at least temporarily given up his gridiron passion to give him time to work as the Vice President of Public Relations for Engineers Without Borders at Penn, a group dedicated to travelling the world and bringing necessary hygienic technologies to poorer countries.

“Quitting [sprint football] for me was the most bittersweet thing that I’ve had to do, and at first, I was just trying to ignore the fact that I had to quit by not talking to anybody about it, but I had to face it,” said Matos, who also said he hopes to return to the program as a senior. “But [Engineers Without Borders] is super fulfilling, in the sense that being able to slow down, I’m gonna look back at school and say that I did these service projects, that I was able to help

COURTESY OF CONNOR BORKERT

Former Penn men’s track and field javelin thrower Connor Borkert left the team to free up time for activities such as NROTC and competitive power lifting.

these people. When I’m playing football, I’m pursuing my passions and what I love, but I’m not giving back at all.”

Making the transition emotionally easier for many former athletes is the inherent family culture of collegiate sports teams, allowing retirees to remain close with their old teammates even after hanging up their jerseys. Many former student-athletes still live with the people they used to suit up alongside, and they also often make the trips down to the east side of campus to support their old teams, proving that the brotherhood between teammates never fully fades even as the roster names change.

“Most of my social events definitely still come through the track team for sure. I still live with people that are solely on the track team, and I’m still involved pretty heavily with the Penn track and field family,” Borkert, who left the team after his sophomore year, said. “Oh yeah, I’ll definitely go support them at the home and local meets, and I know come spring time, when I come to the meets, I’ll just be like, ‘Damn, I wish I could be out there with them.’”

But while the friendships might still exist, nothing can fully replicate the collegiate athletic experience, no matter how hard any former athletes might try.

Borkert, for one, did manage

to maintain a competitive aspect in his life by picking up powerlifting, but most others aren’t so lucky. Having grown up for years accustomed to the structure of scheduled team workouts, the elation of succeeding at an elite

something to do, and yeah, that was great when I finished it, but nothing will compare to the feeling of touching the wall and getting your best time.”

Ultimately, for better or worse, life goes on for all of

“Doing team cheers, being in the locker room just blasting music, dancing and singing before meets — that’s just something that I really, really miss” - Marissa moskalow

level, and the bonds that come from doing it all alongside a beloved group of teammates, many former athletes come to a conclusion that while new hobbies in life can prove challenging and fulfilling, there are certain emotional voids that just can’t be filled.

“Doing team cheers, being in the locker room just blasting music, dancing and singing before meets — that’s just something that I really, really miss, having that team aspect. And I definitely miss the competition; I loved having that competitive outlet, and I don’t have that anymore,” Moskalow said. “Last year, I ran a half-marathon just to give myself like a goal of

Penn’s former student-athletes.

And as they all embark on their new passions, it’s clear that while they almost unanimously find new areas in which to excel, those sentiments of “what if” may never fully fade.

“I’m still on [the sprint football] Hudl playlist — I guess I should ask to get off of that — but I go back and I watch the highlights of the games and definitely I wish I was out there,” Matos said. “But I don’t look back, man, and I’m happy that I have the time to grasp what I think real success is … now it seems like I’m in a position to be able to turn it around and be able to play one last season, so I’m in a really good place to be.”

COURTESY OF MARISSA MOSKALOW

Junior Marissa Moskalow, former women’s swimmer, prioritized academics over athletics. Since leaving the team, the Nursing student has increased her work-study hours and volunteerism.

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PENN’S INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER

FINDING NEW

PASSIONS Not all athletes play four years; some take up new hobbies COLE JACOBSON

Senior Sports Reporter Saying goodbye to something you love is never easy.

For a number of former Penn studentathletes, however, the most difficult move of their lives often ends up being the most

necessary one. And while starting their next chapters after leaving Penn varsity teams provides former Quakers with major fulfillments in their own right, the sports world’s unique thrills of competition, triumphs and camaraderie often prove difficult to replace.

Nearly all Penn athletes enter the university with the intent of sticking around for all four years and there’s no single universal reason why some student-athletes choose to give up their sports, but a few culprits tend

to be most common. For many, the love of the game simply fades at the collegiate level, whether due to the presence of better competition, burnout coming from a drastically ramped up athletic workload or the struggles of meshing with an entirely new group of coaches and teammates.

For others, it’s not so much the sport itself, but rather the pressures that build up around it at Penn. When attempting to SEE PASSIONS PAGE 15

JULIA SCHORR | DESIGN EDITOR

How I cope with mental health issues as a student-athlete

Penn Athletics must allow a conversation on mental health

as to why I didn’t have it today.

Maybe I left it in my locker.

Maybe I’d rifle through my backpack and tell her to come back to me later and hope she forgot.

The closer she got, however, the more it felt like I was being pulled back into my head; like my consciousness was getting further and further from my eyes. In the next moments, I felt my chest get tight and I started to sweat profusely. I didn’t know what was happening but I could not stop thinking about how the girl sitting next to me smelled so strongly of cigarettes it was burning my brain. My breaths got shorter and shorter and shorter until I felt like I was breathing in a coffin. I got up from my seat and, without any explanation, rushed as calmly as I could — which was not very calmly at all — to the nearest bathroom, locked the door of the first stall behind me, and threw up.

After a few minutes, I took the shirt I had brought for football practice later that day and tried to get as much of the sweat off of me as I could to little avail; it was like I had stepped into a shower that was too cold and quickly bounced out to wait for it to heat but got wet nonetheless. When I did as much as I could to clean myself up, I walked back into the classroom, tightly strolled to my seat in the third row, fourth seat from the right, next to the girl who smoked too many cigarettes and started taking notes.

Seven. Six. Five.

Being a student-athlete at a place like Penn is a completely and utterly unique experience.

There is nothing in the world

ever we have spoken with anyone working in Penn Athletics from the lowest staffer up to the athletic director, excuse after excuse found a way to avoid speaking about the subject.

It started with depression.

We sought to open up a conversation about the circumstances surrounding the suicide of Timothy Hamlett, a track and field athlete who died in the 2014-15 school year. Allegations in an active lawsuit

by Hamlett’s parents state that Robin Martin, Hamlett’s coach, knew that Hamlett had “attempted suicide” in the past and did not show any attempt to check in with Hamlett — calling his parents instead and expressing concern for his use of marijuana.

Penn’s Director of Athletic Communications and the Director of Athletics have both declined to comment on the topic.

Hamlett was the second track athlete to die by suicide that year. Madison Holleran died a year earlier after a long struggle with her mental health that other people had knowledge of.

But depression isn’t the only mental health issue we’ve sought to cover. Next, we wanted to talk about the physical health of athletes and their brains. Multiple football, sprint football, and soccer players each year suffer concussions that have far-reaching repercussions. Not even just in the long-term, when former athletes can become afflicted with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), but in the short term, athletes must navigate a series of issues ranging from handling classes while still

ZACK DIGREGORIO

Ten. Nine. Eight.

They say that when you get worked up about something to count down from ten or repeat a mantra to try to calm down. But what happens when your chest gets so tight that you can’t think about what comes after seven?

What about when your stomach is lurching up your throat at what feels like 1,000 miles an hour? How are you supposed to remember a mantra when you are trying to stop your eyes from darting from right to left, constantly in search of something but you’re not sure what, all while you are trying to figure out how to escape your shirt that is inexplicably and suddenly trying to pull you inside out?

I had my first panic attack when I was 17. I was sitting in my AP Statistics class, third row back, fourth seat from the right.

It was a crisp early October day and I remember the vivid fall colors adorning the trees outside the windows to my right: burnt orange leaves with the veins dyed deeper orange hues, blood red, perfectly symmetrical foliage interspersed with faded green stragglers — the colors you’d associate with a picturesque fall day in Princeton, N.J. My teacher was coming around to check homework — homework that I obviously had not done despite being up all night the night before. I was trying to come up with an excuse

that can truly prepare a seventeen or eighteen year old to be thrown right into competing in the classroom and on the field here. People often talk about the new, exciting level of independence that comes with a college experience, but no one ever talks about the isolation that comes with that new, overwhelming endeavor and the pressure and anxiety feeling that you must be doing something wrong because you’re not happy and these are supposed to be “the best years of your life”.

For me, that pressure, that isolation, that immense sense of loneliness hit hard. I felt like I wasn’t spending enough time on the field to be successful in playing and not spending enough time with new teammates and hallmates to be successful in making friends and not spending enough time studying to be successful in my classes and, all of a sudden I wasn’t sleeping.

Naturally, that made me worse at all three and the stress made me stop eating. I always used to muster a dry laugh when people would talk about the “Freshman Fifteen” because I lost eight pounds in my first two weeks at school.

At first, I thought time was my real limiting factor in feeling comfortable at school. After a certain point, though, it just felt hopeless. I was drowning.

I was spiraling. You name the metaphor, that was me. I hardly went out, and when I did, I became the Wayne Gretzky of the Irish Goodbye. I couldn’t go out, really. By the end of my SEE DIGREGORIO PAGE 14

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WILLIAM SNOW

Student-athletes at Penn have some of the hardest jobs in the world.

They wake up early. They practice in the evenings so they have to stay up late to work.

They sometimes have to cut or gain significant weight in a short period of time. They get injured — and they often play through it. They get concussions, and later in their lives, many of them suffer long-term consequences from it.

But Penn Athletics doesn’t want to talk about any of it.

When we set out to create a Mental Health Issue, we sought to cover all aspects of mental health within the realm of sports at Penn. We wanted to give athletes the chance to talk about all of the pervasive forces you see in Sports Illustrated’s finest pieces, from body image to CTE. Athletes — and especially student-athletes at an Ivy League university — face a unique set of challenges that very few can relate to. I admit that in writing this, I can only lean on what I have seen and heard over three years of covering them, along with a sad past of athletics-related injuries and mental deficiencies myself, to guide my perspective on the topic.

But when we sought to coordinate this issue with Athletic Communications, and when-

concussed to following the steps to be cleared for action once again. And all this is assuming that athletes have their concussions reported to medical staff.

Again, though, Athletic Communications has declined to speak on all facets of the subject, from the short-term considerations of concussion protocol to the long-term considerations athletes face when participating in high-impact sports.

As the gatekeeper for reaching student-athletes, Penn Athletics has significant influence in campus discourse that involves them. While they might understandably shield athletes who have just suffered from a crushing defeat, they act too quickly to shield student-athletes from all sensitive discourse altogether.

Wrestlers, gymnasts and sprint football players all must worry constantly about their weight or their appearances.

Surely having to spend so much time looking at a scale or a mirror has an effect on athletes — but we can’t know. At times, Penn Athletics speaks for its athletes by saying the athletes wouldn’t feel comfortable speaking on this subject; at others, they say they wouldn’t feel comfortable having the athletes speaking about it.

Student-athletes have hard lives, but they’re not alone. The entire Penn community has had a difficult year thus far. Multiple deaths, mental health issues and other hardship has driven the Penn administration to finally open up in an unprecedented SEE SNOW PAGE 14

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