Content warning: This article contains references to suicide.
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is a hotline for individuals in crisis or for those looking to help someone else. To speak with a certified listener, call 1-800-273-8255.
Crisis Text Line is a texting service for emotional crisis support. To speak with a trained listener, text HELLO to 741741. It is free, available 24/7 and confidential.
To talk with a counselor from Yale Mental Health and Counseling, schedule a session here. On-call counselors are available at any time: call (203) 432-0290.
Students who are interested in taking a medical withdrawal should reach out to their residential college dean.
Additional resources are available in a guide compiled by the Yale College Council here.
***
The Yale Daily News recently published two op-eds railing against Yale’s arrival quarantine measures. Each was born out of a shortsighted misunderstanding of Yale’s policies, and neither merits much refutation, as the criticisms made in each became largely irrelevant after classes resumed in person this Monday. The hyper-privileged disdain for immunocompromised students and faculty found in these articles is a familiar sentiment at Yale. What is novel, and what made the latter of these two articles particularly disturbing to much of Yale’s campus, is that the News allowed the invoking of Rachael Shaw-Rosenbaum’s suicide to agitate for policies which would jeopardize the safety of immunocompromised students and faculty.
I am a disabled Yale student and a survivor of suicide. I am a trans woman; for years I have been friends with and mentored young trans people, both at Yale and beyond, who have struggled with suicidal ideation. I believe these two op-eds betray a fundamental misunderstanding of community health, mental health and suicide at Yale. Yale’s mental health difficulties have very little to do with two-week quarantines and everything to do with structural problems at Yale Mental Health & Counseling.
Though not explicitly written into the Undergraduate Regulations, it is almost universally understood among the affected students I come across that Yale’s policy surrounding severely mentally ill students is to force them to withdraw. Anyone who attempts suicide is forced to withdraw automatically — as I was, though I ultimately withdrew voluntarily. Those who get close are pressured to do so, regardless of the student’s financial, familial and medical security. The criticism of this policy has been central to the activism surrounding Rachael’s death; it has not yet meaningfully changed. Across experiences, this policy severely damages students’ ability to access adequate care and, as I know from my own experience, from speaking with other suicidal Yale students, and from reflecting on the activism surrounding Rachael’s death, can drive students closer to suicide.
The University’s public denial of these realities rings hollow for students struggling with suicidal ideation, who must reckon with several cruel Catch-22’s: those who rely on financial aid to give them health insurance cannot disclose their suicidal ideation without risking losing their access to health care, those who are forced to withdraw must pay for two college credits without any financial aid before they are able to return to Yale, and those with chronic mental health issues who are forced to withdraw more than once are all but barred from the institution. Those who remain are forced to deal with Yale Mental Health & Counseling, which has a fraction of the funding and resources needed to be effective. Melanie Boyd once stipulated that involuntary withdrawals were “exceedingly rare” — I suspect this to be, in part, because the students who would be forced to withdraw involuntarily are too terrified to disclose their suicidality, continuing on without receiving adequate care. I know students who face this reality every day.
I sometimes wonder if I did not have parents who were able to afford a therapist and psychiatrist outside Yale Health if I would still be alive. Before my attempt, I was not taken seriously by the Yale administration. My parents, not long before my attempt, contacted the administration expressing their concern and were told there was nothing they could do short of calling the police. Since my attempt, the administration has treated me with grace. They respond to my emails quickly; they don’t argue with me when I ask for accommodations. The subtext — please, please don’t kill yourself. I am thankful for this attitude. It has allowed me to access the resources I need. I only wish I was treated with this attitude beforehand. This discernment is only human and not unique to Yale; I was not taken seriously by my psychiatrist before my attempt, either. But I suspect that on a policy level this is pragmatic — thousands of debilitatingly depressed students generate less bad press than one dead one.
—
I do not mean to belittle, for any student on this campus, the trauma of the death of a peer or to discount that every person at this University is at serious risk of developing severe mental illness. But the “Yale Experience” crowd is simply not the vulnerable population at Yale when it comes to mental health. It is the immunocompromised students who have to fear serious injury or death when they realize the boy in a quarter-zip sitting next to them in lecture has his mask beneath his nose. It is first-generation, low-income students who know that they cannot get adequate mental health care without risking being kicked out of Yale. Only students who are massively institutionally supported by Yale and completely unaware of it could think that two weeks of Zoom classes for the sake of their peers amounts to oppression.
When Sapre writes, “And what lies on the other side of the scale? Happiness. The Yale Experience,” half of campus rolls its eyes. When Schorr deadpans, “Don’t be selfish, they tell us, you have a responsibility to protect the immunocompromised and the community,” half of campus flinches.
Yale’s arrival quarantine measures were critically important for both the community’s physical and mental health. On Jan. 14, the first day students returned to campus, Connecticut had 8,783 new cases — four times as many cases as the initial spike in 2020. On Feb. 4, Connecticut had 1,269 new cases, approximately the same as early December last year. Even though Yale’s policies are among the most aggressive in the nation, they still put disabled and immunocompromised students at risk. The crowded, unmasked dining halls with inconsistent carry-out options terrify high-risk students, who cannot be treated as an anomaly — between 19 to 50 percent of non-elderly Americans have some type of pre-existing medical condition. Even for healthy students, risks remain. Death is not the only consequence of infection — healthy, vaccinated friends of mine with no prior immunological problems have developed debilitatingly intense long-COVID-19 symptoms with no clear end date after an infection. Were Yale to open in person two weeks earlier, with eight times the cases, this might be the fate of a small swath of the class. It is nothing short of cruel that students are not willing to spend two weeks with mild restrictions to avoid this.
—
As we near the anniversary of Rachael’s death and brace ourselves for its grief — all of us, including the Yale administration — and as we enter the third year of a global pandemic, I urge each of us to take on the grace of my failed suicide. In the moment the doctor pulls back the curtain and tells you you’re not going to die, you are given an ultimatum. You are too weak and too contemptuous in the moment to realize it has been given to you, to realize the command — dissolve — but it has already begun, however many years it may take. In the stale fluorescent light of the room, in the weight of the blankets, you are caught. It is easy to sink into the bed, to sink into yourself; it is easier to fall asleep. But to sleep only as much as you need, and to wake up afterwards, requires a profound dissolution of self. You cannot leave that room as yourself, so you must leave as someone else. Do not hide from this; there is strength in this. There is strength in the ability to admit when we have entrenched ourselves in ways of being which do not serve us.
I believe that, for the able-bodied students for whom the phrase “The Yale Experience” does not immediately elicit a cringe, the terror instilled by confronting a student’s suicide is genuinely novel. The natural impulse of such a student, when so violently forced to confront that their sphere of comfort and privilege is a farce, is to cling to what they have known, to dig their feet into the ground. But in this profound trauma, in its totalizing fragility, is the same power to dissolve oneself granted by actually surviving a suicide — the will to reject the “Yale Experience,” for both the boy with his mask beneath his nose and for the Yale Administration, to turn away from what is stale and comfortable and to build something compassionate and new.
Laurel Turner (she/they/he) is sophomore in Silliman College majoring in English and math. Her email is laurel.turner@yale.edu.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Laurel wishes to add the following to this article:
To the student who is struggling with suicidal ideation: I did not write this article for you. The realities of Yale’s policy failures deserve to be critiqued without holding back. This does not mean that there is not hope at Yale. I did not explore it here because it is too dear to me to make public. You are stronger than you know for making it this far. Despite everything there are networks of care at Yale and beyond which can catch you. Please do not hesitate to reach out to me.