News For Thought: Broader Mental Health, Learning To Swim

Internet troubles have slowed a bunch of pending posts, but in the meantime, I want to post an incredible project the Columbia Daily Spectator has been printing for a month or so: Mind Matters.

It's about mental illness and mental health in general, not just about ADD, but certainly worth the read.

And, for an incredible, personal account, read the editor's column, the first paragraphs (and last) of which are published below:

To the tenured, highly esteemed anthropology professor who failed me last spring:
“Why are you even here?”

This was the first thing you said to me a year ago when I sat down in your office before you explained that I would not be passing your class.

It was understandable. I barely attended any lectures or discussion sections, let alone turned in any of the assignments. I earned what Columbia students have to work extremely hard to receive: an F.

I left Schermerhorn, bawling as I walked back to Watt, where I hid for the entirety of my junior year. I thought about Richard Ng, a student who committed suicide by jumping into the East River two years prior. I didn’t know how to swim. It could work!

I ended the semester with an impressive 1.8 GPA. I felt mostly dead. But looking back, I realize I was living, and that was the point.

“Why are you even here?”

I didn’t come to Columbia to be depressed, mind you. I came here to take my high school valediction and press onward, to become editor-in-chief of this paper, to meet the man of my dreams. None of these things happened.

After a tremendous freshman year, things spiraled. I teetered on the edge of my 20th floor window in EC and looked down.

Over the next year, I would accumulate a number of diagnoses: major depression, recurrent, without full inter-episode recovery (DSM-IV 296.32), and borderline personality disorder (DSM-IV 301.83). One psychiatrist told me I actually had bipolar disorder. My mom told me I wasn’t practicing Islam enough. A professor actually told me I was a liar. My friend told me I was just being 20.

You could say this period constituted a Profound Experience, the one often criticized in other senior columns. I know I’m a cliché, and I laugh about it often. (See headline.) But, it is my experience, and it is all that I have....

I am painfully aware that I might have another depressive episode in the future.

But this time, I can handle it.

I wish you could see me now, professor. I got a 4.0 last semester. I live on the 20th floor of EC again, two doors down from a previous site of trauma. I am learning how to swim.