Mental Health at Princeton University
"I'm not depressed, I just need to work harder" – Don't ignore it, talk about it!
I have started a long list of friends and family members to whom I’m writing letters on a rolling basis. I bought a small selection of notecards, but am also just using regular paper to do so. While some of my mail has been in a perpetual limbo, reaching out to friends and family, especially those overseas, has made me feel connected and surrounded by loved ones, especially as they have begun to respond with letters and notecards of their own.
Poem by Michael Lentz
I was surprised that the first thing I did was pull up the Decameron, which I haven’t really opened since I graduated college 5 years ago. The Decameron is a Thousand-Arabian nights book written during the Black Death in Florence. In that same vein, poetry and literature have helped me. Thinking about them while I see all the trees and flowers bloom during Spring has brought some sense of peace and perspective day to day. Reaching out to friends has also really helped. This pandemic is global, so I think everyone everywhere is feeling nervous, anxious, and stressed. Contacting an old friend on facebook or instagram to tell them that my family and I are still doing OK and that I hope they’re OK as well has brought a lot of comfort. I try to limit myself to one social call a day, preferably during a walk so I can get some exercise and sunshine. That being said, having a therapist through the university health plan has been really useful. I encourage folks to reach out to the health center and talk with a counselor to see if you can get some short term help or long term help. Therapy isn’t the only way or outlet for folks, but I have found it comforting and I encourage people to try or even consider it.
I’ve built routine into my days, but I don’t feel obliged to be particularly “productive.” In a typical weekday, I’ll get up a little later than I used to, enjoy coffee and breakfast while reading the news, spend a couple hours working (sometimes a whole day if I feel up to it or interested and into it), and then spend the rest of my time cooking, baking, reading for pleasure, and playing Animal Crossing. And this is good. Taking care of myself (physically, mentally) and my partner is enough. Being is enough.
This pandemic has combined two of my greatest fears: (1) a (possible) global breakdown of civilization in which I am totally useless, become a burden on others, and then perish in a moldy cave, and (2) losing my parents prematurely. My entire family is made of healthcare providers, and my parents are located in one of the U.S. epicenters. The first few weeks of this pandemic were filled with profound, overwhelming anxiety and fear. I already deal with generalized anxiety and depression in the best of situations, much less during an unprecedented pandemic during which we are led by an absolute moron. I was gripped by the news and couldn’t look away. The fear and anxiety eventually morphed into sheer, abject rage at everything – the government, the president, spring breakers, anti-vaxxers, travelers, this situation, the helplessness, the racism, the mask/ventilator shortage, the danger my family and others are in. It felt good for a while, felt righteous and real and true and valid in a way that my feelings don’t normally feel. But it was also exhausting, and I alternated between rage, fear, and guilt.
Now that we’re over a month into this, I’ve started to come to grips with the situation. I remind myself that my family, friends and loved ones are taking all the precautions they can, and that I am doing everything I can. I’ve substantially cut down on my news intake, limiting myself to reading NY Times in the morning and an update in the afternoon. I don’t read any news in the evening or before bed. I write in my journal almost every day, and try to meditate before bed every night. I go to video therapy once a week. I vent to friends. When things get really bad and I start spiraling, I take an anti-anxiety medication in addition to my daily antidepressant. I spend a lot of time planning what I’m going to cook. I have scheduled weekly zoom calls with friends and family. I practice cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness. I spend a lot of time texting with friends and family. I try to go to bed at a reasonable hour.
Stay tuned to see stories submitted anonymously by graduate students addressing their mental health. This Spring, we are facing unprecedented challenges in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We are all experiencing a great deal of mental distress between the abrupt need for social distancing, the uncertain nature of the pandemic, and concerns for our own health as well as the health of our loved ones. The GSG is working to build virtual community spaces to increase social connectedness in this time. However, the chaotic “soup” of uncertainty and anxiety in which we find ourselves has most certainly taken a significant toll on graduate students’ mental health. Thank you for sharing with us the challenges you are facing in the midst of this pandemic and what has helped with these difficulties. We will be posting daily here and on our Slack and Facebook pages.
Thank you everyone for making Mental Health Awareness Month such a success and helping us on our mission to make Princeton a healthier and more inclusive campus!
We hope you can continue to use this website as a resource! And stay tuned for events in the spring and next fall!
We couldn’t have done this without help from the Grad Mental Health Initiative, Sarah Marie Bruno, all of our wonderful panelists for their perspective and discussion, Sejal Shah for a moving keynote address, The Seeing Eye, CPS counselors, our sponsors: Graduate Student Govenment, Campus Conversations Grant, TigerWell, The Graduate School, Counseling and Psychological Services, Campus Recreation, Office of Disability Services, LGBT Center, & Lewis-Sigler Institute, and everyone who helped us to make this month possible!
Many people seem to think that everyone at places like Princeton suffers from impostor syndrome and that feelings of intellectual inadequacy are always the problem. This is not true; some of us have no doubts about whether we belong because we are minorities, and there is no one else like us in eyesight on campus to do what we do and say what we know. The problem is that it can be extremely alienating to be a minority on campus, and even more so in supposedly liberal contexts that advertise inclusiveness but refuse to make any of the changes necessary to make the space truly accessible to different kinds of people. For my own part, it is a big problem that I have had to work so hard to create a space for gender-nonconforming and nonbinary students on campus. I’ve never in my life had a teacher or professor who is nonbinary like me, or any other such role-model. I used to think that was because I was the only one, but now I see that people like me have always existed and have just been driven underground by a widespread and deeply entrenched discomfort with challenges to the gender-binary. I constantly have to explain and re-explain my gender to my own professors, and face the humiliation of being misgendered (often in front of a class) on a regular basis. Perhaps even worse is the conversation I’ve had more times than I can count in which I’m told not to let this distract me from my school work, or that identity isn’t relevant to scholarship and needn’t come up in classes. Others seem to think scholars like me are all naturally gender scholars and that it’s therefore only necessary to talk about identity and politics in a class about gender or race. What would make it easier to thrive on campuses for many minorities is for it to be understood that no material is apolitical, and that every discipline and field must be actively made accessible to all kinds of scholars. I don’t just want to see people like me teaching gender studies, but all fields. It brings great joy and relief from loneliness and depression to do what small things I can to bring these visions into reality; but I can’t deny the pain I feel at every roadblock. It’s been a long haul, and there seems to be little understanding on campuses of just how much long-term, low-grade alienation can degrade a human being and scholar.
Depression crept up slowly during my time in graduate school. I used to think I was, paradoxically, both one of the angriest and one of the happiest people I knew, a sense of purposeful outrage and moral disgruntlement being (I thought) the flipside of the coin of joyful energy and vitality. Over time, and thanks in large part to escalating political events, I began to realize that rage was killing me slowly: poisoning my wellbeing, hindering my relationships, and making me increasingly avoidant of even simple tasks. For a long time this was a bigger problem for my personal wellbeing than for my scholarly work (which often was a joyful respite from terrible dealings), but eventually the latter couldn’t but be affected by my descent into lifelessness and despair. I re-entered therapy in 2017, a first crucial step, and have since invested a great deal of energy and earnestness into my personal recovery. One of the greatest challenges in this has been to tune out, or put in perspective, the Princetontian voices (which are often subliminal but sometimes quite explicit) that tell me that my academic work is the reason to get better, rather than something that will naturally and happily benefit from the work that I do to thrive as a human being. The ideology of this feverish moment in late capitalism makes it all too commonly assumed that the reason to thrive is so you can be productive (i.e. for an employer or institution). That idea itself is a cause of depression, and I’ve been hard-pressed to find this kind of instrumentalizing thinking sufficiently refuted or disrupted at Princeton. What has been of the greatest help to me is to speak honestly about my experiences with depression and alienation with others who understand or at least are willing to listen deeply. A thriving community–both personal communities and collaborative work communities–is what I seek, and the precarity of these (even once carefully and lovingly established) is a great source of loneliness and depression. I have found that many individuals at Princeton are hungry for a little authenticity and honesty and have responded extremely favorably when I have opened up about my experience; and yet the normalization of ongoing, unattended suffering as part of the academic game that’s supposed to be taken as a matter of course and born with a stiff upper lip is widespread at Princeton, including within my own department. In other words, the stigma around mental health continues unabated even as we hear endless talk about the need for a “conversation” about mental health on campuses. I am waiting for the day it becomes actually okay to talk about, not just okay to talk about talking about it. This will not get better until the culture and values of academia improve and we learn to prioritize full human beings, not just functionaries who produce impressive data or research. Bell Hooks says teachers have a responsibility to self-actualize so as to be able to support their students in doing so; it’s not something I’ve ever heard someone say at Princeton, but I believe it from the bottom of my heart and have taken the greatest comfort of all in being a teacher and preceptor so that I can put this belief into practice in my own classroom.
I have OCD. My help and healing are from my religion. I believe God has forgiven all my sins through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ. He has given me new life and peace that surpasses understanding. He puts everything in perspective and further heals my mind every day. Without Him (and the loving, steadfast, forgiving community that comes with Him) I’d be utterly lost. Besides turning to God for everlasting peace and joy, here are two practical things that calm the mind: running and breathing meditation (which can be seen as a form of contemplative — as opposed to verbal — prayer). Also, avoiding caffeine has helped.