The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays

by Esmé Weijun Wang

In 2014, Katie J. M. Baker published an article in Newsweek titled “How Colleges Flunk Mental Health.” It was the piece I’d been waiting for—after blogging about my Yale experience, I’d received a flood of emails from students battling to stay in their colleges, students on enforced leave from their colleges, and former college students who, like me, were never allowed to return to school. In her article, Baker makes the case that psychiatric illness is punished by colleges and universities that instead ought to be accommodating students under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Rather than receiving help, mentally ill students are frequently, as I was, pressured into leaving—or ordered to leave—by the schools that once welcomed them. The underlying expectation is that a student must be mentally healthy to return to school, which is difficult and unlikely to happen to the degree the administration would like. This is saying, essentially, that students should not have severe mental illness.