At the beginning of this semester, The Phoenix conducted an informal online poll which revealed that a substantial portion of the 189 students who chose to respond had struggled with mental health issues. More than half of respondents reported suffering from anxiety or depression while at Swarthmore, and almost 40 percent had considered transferring to another college. The previous two articles of this Phoenix series focused on mental health services available at Swarthmore and on the experience of a student who sought help from teachers in dealing with psychological issues. Now, the series will detail the experience of Laura Fitzgerald ’14 with administrators in the wake of her suicide attempt last November.
The day after Fitzgerald attempted suicide, her friends who had gone to the emergency room with her that night received an email from the Dean’s Office. Somehow, the deans had acquired a list of all of Fitzgerald’s friends who had visited her in the ER. The email told Fitzgerald’s friends that they would face legal repercussions if they spoke about her suicide attempt with anyone.
While Fitzgerald believes that the motivations behind this email were intended to protect her confidentiality, ensuring that information about her suicide attempt would be hers to disclose, the wording of the message frightened her friends. When Fitzgerald’s friends told her about the contents of the email, she felt silenced.
“It kind of made me feel like what happened was something I should be ashamed of and that I shouldn’t talk about,” she said. Fitzgerald doesn’t think that this was the intended message, but the wording of the email strongly suggested this silencing, shaming motivation.
The email incident, in which Fitzgerald was made to feel by administrators that she should be ashamed, guilty, and silent about her suicide attempt last November, is emblematic of the way in which administrators dealt with Fitzgerald and her struggles with mental health issues.
Following her suicide attempt, Fitzgerald left campus for the rest of the semester. Towards the end, at the beginning of December, Fitzgerald began to speak with several deans about returning for the spring semester. First, she met with Director of Counseling and Psychological Services David Ramirez, who Fitzgerald said was nothing but helpful.
Next, Fitzgerald had to meet with her class dean. She said that it seemed as though the Dean’s Office strongly opposed scheduling the meeting. Fitzgerald was told multiple times that the deans were extremely busy and might not be able to meet with her until the beginning of the next semester. Fitzgerald resisted and continued to push for a meeting because she wanted to sort out her housing situation and find out when she would be able to return to campus.
While delaying the meeting further, the deans also told Fitzgerald that they were not only busy, but that other students were in similar situations.
“I was kind of uncomfortable with them just offhandedly sharing that information,” Fitzgerald recounted. “They obviously didn’t tell me the name of the student or anything, but for how obsessive they were about confidentiality with my friends it was kind of strange, and they were almost kind of joking about it.”
Additionally, the way in which the deans spoke about her experience and that of the other student made Fitzgerald feel as though she and other students with mental health problems were a burden on the administrators.
Fitzgerald also grappled with a lack of clarity in her attempts to return to campus. Once she was finally able to schedule the meetings, the deans wanted to know exactly when Fitzgerald would be on campus. She was not permitted to return to her room or to stay in the room of one of her friends.
“It wasn’t really clear to me why that was. They just said that they didn’t feel comfortable with my staying on campus at that time, and that I had to stay off campus in a hotel with one of my parents,” Fitzgerald explained.
While she is sure that her inability to stay on campus was due to issues beyond the control of administrators, possibly related to liability, none of this was explained or made clear to her. Fitzgerald felt rejected by the campus.
“It kind of made me feel like I wasn’t welcome back at that point,” she said.
This unwelcoming feeling only grew after Fitzgerald’s meeting with her class dean. At the end of the meeting, the dean told Fitzgerald to remember that her friends were people too, and that her problems could sometimes be difficult for them.
“I understand what she was trying to say — I think she meant to say your friends should have support too, but that’s not what she said,” Fitzgerald said.
“Then she said — I remember this phrase very clearly — ‘Remember that your actions have impact on other people in the community,’ which made me feel really guilty and ashamed of my suicide attempt,” Fitzgerald remembered.
She felt like she was a burden on others and upsetting to other people, which, Fitzgerald thinks, is probably the number one thing which psychologists would not recommend telling someone with suicidal tendencies.
Fitzgerald’s dean also told her that she wanted to have weekly meetings throughout the spring semester, to check in on Fitzgerald and see how she was doing. The dean has not contacted Fitzgerald once this semester. While Fitzgerald didn’t necessarily want to speak to the dean again, she was troubled by this response, and does not feel as though the administration has reached out either to her, or to the rest of the student body, to discuss issues of mental health.
“It’s upsetting, because unfortunately I don’t think I’m going to be the last student who has a similar experience,” Fitzgerald said.
Fitzgerald has spoken with several other students who left campus for a semester or a year and had an extremely difficult time convincing administrators that they should be allowed to return to campus. She feels that the administration’s protocol for dealing with issues of mental health and its communication with students returning from leaves of absence, could drastically improve.
“Hearing about those stories and reflecting on my own story, it just kind of feels like the administration is probably inadvertently sending the message that mental health issues shouldn’t be discussed, and people with mental health issues aren’t really welcome,” Fitzgerald said.
This is especially upsetting to Fitzgerald due to the fact that a large proportion of college-age students suffer from various mental health issues, exacerbated by the transition to college and the difficulty of creating a new social support system. Fitzgerald believes it would be beneficial for the administration to foster a greater number of conversations about mental health, acknowledging mental health as a problem and providing support for community members.
“A lot of the time, it doesn’t turn into a suicide attempt,” Fitzgerald explained. “In severe cases it does, but most of the time if friends and supporters intervene before it gets to that point it can make a world of difference.”
In addition to fostering openness and discussion, Fitzgerald wishes that in her case, the administration had attempted more supportive communication with her friends.
“I think it would’ve really helped my friends because obviously it was a tough time for them too,” Fitzgerald reflected, adding that she was not the only one affected by her depression or her suicide attempt. “It would’ve been really helpful for them to have felt like they were able to go to the deans or been able to talk about what was going on.”
Fitzgerald also wished that the policies about returning or staying on campus for students on leaves of absence were more clear. Finally, she wished that her conversation with her class dean had been more supportive.
“I wish that she hadn’t said some things which focused on the repercussions of my suicide attempt, rather than why it happened or how [the administration] could support me when I came back,” Fitzgerald said.
In terms of how Swarthmore’s culture affected her experience with mental health issues, Fitzgerald believes there could be more openness about struggling with mental health issues on the part of not only the administration but also the student body.
Fitzgerald had a great deal of trouble with being open about her problems. While she knew that her friends wanted to be there for her, and would try to get her to talk, because they could sense that something was off, she found herself unable to open up. Fitzgerald believes that this is partially due to the environment in which she was raised, but also to Swarthmore’s misery-poker-focused culture.
“If someone talks to you about anxiety, I think a lot of times the instinct reaction is to say, ‘Well, I have a lot of stuff going on, too,’” Fitzgerald said. “A lot of people will misinterpret someone saying that they’re stressed as someone trying to play misery poker.” Fitzgerald also believes that there is a great deal of internal pressure at Swarthmore to present oneself as organized and in control of their academic and social situations.
“I feel like there’s just kind of an expectation that you can get done everything that you need to get done, so it was hard to have to say, I can’t do this on my own, there’s something wrong, and I don’t know to fix it, and I was never really able to say that,” Fitzgerald said.
Because her depression was so severe, Fitzgerald is unsure whether her experience would have been different at another school, as she thinks there is a large biological component to her mental health issues.
“It might have been easier for me to ask for help in a different environment, but I’m not sure that any other college I’ve heard about has a much more open environment, at least when it comes to mental health,” Fitzgerald reflected, adding that this silence around mental health problems is not confined to colleges but pervades the culture of the rest of society as well.
On April 18, Fitzgerald published an opinion piece in The Daily Gazette, in which she shed light on her experiences struggling with depression and anxiety and recounted the events leading up to her suicide attempt. Following her piece, old friends from high school and fellow Swarthmore students flooded Fitzgerald’s email and Facebook inboxes with messages of support and solidarity. Nearly every message Fitzgerald received was from someone who had been through similar experiences, not necessarily with suicide attempts but with depression and anxiety.
“It was just kind of shocking how many people kind of came out of the woodwork,” Fitzgerald said. While Fitzgerald was happy that others shared their stories with her, she was floored by the number of those who had had similar experiences. “There are just so many more people struggling than I think any of us realize,” she said.
Fitzgerald was thanked for her piece and told many times that she was extremely brave. While she was happy that many people connected with her story, she wishes that her actions — speaking openly about her own experiences instead of choosing to be silent or ashamed — weren’t so out of the ordinary.
“One of my goals in publishing my story was that in the future it doesn’t have to be such a brave act to speak out about struggling with depression or struggling with anything,” she concluded.
