“I saw myself sleeping all day, drinking more and eating less.”

Here at Harvard, we do not admit to each other that we are in therapy.

We don’t admit to having panic attacks or nervous breakdown. We certainly don’t tell our friends that we are on anti-depressants. If we show up to class on occasion in an unusually messy state of dishabille, we tell our concerned friends that we’re stressed – really stressed.

Somehow, we cannot communicate with each other about what goes on under the surface. If one of us chooses to take time off from school for mental health reasons, we tell our friends that we’re suffering from an “existential crisis” – our friends nod knowingly and refrain from asking further questions.

I admit to having used this excuse when I abruptly withdrew mid-semester. When pressed for details, I tried to be as casual – and as evasive – as possible, with talk of “unmet expectations” and “unproductive patterns of behavior.”

One friend said, I think only half-jokingly, that he thought I had left school to go to rehab. Apparently, drug addiction springs to mind before clinical depression.

These vague and self-destructive “bad habits” caused me to panic and run away from my academic commitments. I saw myself sleeping all day, drinking more, and eating less.

I felt that the only way I could cope was to fight back with recklessness and a certain hedonistic self-indulgence, feeling increasingly helpless and contemptible as the semester progressed. I lived for the immediate gratification of the weekend, and I ran away from the challenges and commitment facing me.

My hedonistic behaviors belonged to the more general tendency of many Harvard students to psychologically self-medicate. Whether we use alcohol, drugs, sex or status, we convince ourselves that we’ve earned the right to fuck around and fuck ourselves up a little. It helps us temporarily forget our insignificance and collective fear of failure.

By living on the edge, we feel that we can earn the backwards respect of our peers, even if underneath all the dangerous show lies nothing but imminent self-destruction and a lack of self-respect.

Two months into the semester, I finally acknowledged to myself that I had to ask for help. This happened the night before a midterm, when a panic attack at 1:30 am in Lamont convinced my roommate that I needed to pay a visit to After Hours Urgent Care.

Having avoided the class all semester, I was drastically unprepared. A night spent at Stillman Infirmary looked like a very convenient way to buy myself more time to prepare, knowing that I would go in there with a mental health crisis, and come out the next morning with a rescheduled midterm.

For those of you who are lucky enough not to know, Stillman is UHS’s fifth-floor hospital wing for the very drunk, the very ill, and the very depressed. After arriving with my concerned roommate, I spent a half hour talking to a therapist, who took notes that were then left for review the following morning by the psychiatric clinician I saw on a regular basis for medication prescription.

The After Hours therapist suggested I spend the night at Stillman, so as to recover my calm and attempt to relax in a safe environment, an idea I was amenable to. The most important paperwork I had to fill out that evening was a breakfast selection sheet for the following morning, immediately after which I went to sleep, and awoke the next day to once again assure the staff that I was not suicidal. I watched Law and Order: Criminal Intent reruns until I was discharged at 1pm the next day.

In the mental health department at UHS, the only crucial question routinely asked is, “Do you have any desire to harm yourself?” This is emblematic of what is perhaps UHS’s biggest problem: ever on guard for life-threatening behaviors, the staff often seems to relegate those with any less immediate mental health problems to low-priority status.