Reflections on Oxford Series Part 8: Oxford and Mental Health.

I know so many people that have rusticated from Oxford. Some of them started out with me and are now a year or two behind me. Some of them would have graduated before meeting me if not for having had to rusticate.

By the time I got to second year, I was truly shocked by the amount of rustications I was seeing. I really just didn’t think it was healthy, or normal, that a university should have such a high concentration of its students intermitting their degrees because of mental health issues, typically depression and anxiety.

What is it about Oxford that makes it so prone to making people like this? Why is it that people that have soared seamlessly through the education system suddenly reach breaking point when they come to Oxford?

It is worrying to me, honestly. In fact, it is a big part of the reason that I knew I had to write this post.

Before I started at Oxford, an acquaintance from back home said to me, “Oxford has one of the highest rates of suicide in the country.” Not the most comforting thing to hear, to be honest – and I assured myself I wouldn’t let it get to me that much, but the reality is, Oxford has been known to and does break people that much.

A few weeks ago, I found out the real cause of death of someone who had been studying at my college. I had sung with my college choir at his memorial service, and I had always wondered sadly how it had come to be that a 23-year old with so much potential had just “died suddenly”, with seemingly no explanation.

I guess it must have been because an enquiry and inquest was still ongoing at the time that the truth was not disclosed to us, but it turned out that the highly gifted PhD student had committed suicide. By jumping in front of train.

Because it had simply become too much for him.

It may seem hard for others to believe or understand how you can get to this point, but honestly, having experienced the kind of pressure that I can imagine this guy was under, I can comprehend it.

The number of suicides that Oxford University has witnessed, in the last forty years alone, is scary. In my second year, two students committed suicide within three months of each other.

In many cases, rustication may help save a life.

Support and Rustication

                But is it always the best course of action?

                Believe it or not, I considered rusticating in those last two months of my degree. I’m glad I didn’t, though, especially in view of some of the horror stories I’ve heard!

                As I said, rustication is a common occurrence on university grounds. I’d say most people know someone who has rusticated. I knew many. Some of them were my close friends.

                In fact, in my first year one of my tutors suggested that I consider rusticating – not because of mental health concerns, but because I had recently been diagnosed with a muscular chronic pain condition which was making my life difficult. (That’s a story for another day.) I was adamant that I didn’t want to – I didn’t want to delay the course of my life, I just wanted to get through my degree in the normal time-frame.

                Come the stress of finals, I was prepared to make that sacrifice to get myself well again, but having been made aware of some things since then, I can’t be completely sure that it would have been better for my mental health and general wellbeing to take a year out.

                There are a lot of things wrong with rustication.

One thing I noticed quite early on in my degree is that rustication seemed to be pressed on people with almost no alternative. You’re struggling with depression?, it seemed to be, OK, just go away for a year and come back better.

Does that always work though, really?

If you’re going to tell someone to go away for a year so that they can manage their depression or anxiety, what are you going to do to ensure that they don’t simply come back twelve months later in exactly the same state – or worse?

Oxford seems to be notoriously bad at this. I can think of at least four people I know who have rusticated twice because of depression.

I think it’s safe to say, rustication wasn’t the cure for them.

In the past, rustication was seen as a punishment. It was complete suspension from one’s studies for a year. In that time, students could not come back to their colleges, not even to go the library or socialise with friends.

You’d think things would have changed, right?

Not so. Even though you are still enrolled on your course, you are not allowed to enter college grounds – so those books you might have been planning to get from the library so you could study in a less stressful environment? You can’t get them.

Get this: at some colleges you are seen as so much of an emblem of shame that when you rusticate, you have to leave through the back gate. You can’t even take all of your things in one go. They have to be sent to you. I have read stories of students who were effectively forced out of college against their will because the college decided it was in their best interest to leave. As in, they found out the day before, You’re leaving, bye. Read more here.

How is that supposed to make anyone already struggling with mental health feel any better?

                I’ve read about and seen first-hand people who have been pushed out of college because they’re told they’re disrupting other people’s studies. One of my friends with a medically-certified physical condition was told by the Senior Tutor that she was “making it all up” and that it was “all in [her] head”. How would that make you feel? She was told that in me, as her friend, willingly helping her out and looking out for her, she was distracting me from my studies. I was infuriated.

                Some colleges have amazing staff that truly care for the welfare of their students. The welfare officer at my college is brilliant – so brilliant that the whole JCR voted to get her a special present to thank her for all she does/did for us! Others don’t. And sometimes there’s a mix of staff that care and staff that really don’t care.

                At some colleges, believe it or not, they have – or had until very recently – photos in the porters’ lodge of all their rusticated students. It was like an FBI most wanted list. If you had the face of one of those people on the wall, you were not welcome on college premises. Come on, is being ill a crime??

                Lots of people come back in a worse state after rustication. They have felt completely isolated during their year away, by virtue of the way they have been treated by their colleges, and are now in a new academic year where they have to make new friends. One girl talked about how, during her year away and afterwards, she had to deal more with the trauma of rusticating than actually dealing with why she’d been rusticated in the first place.

Oxford is not good at dealing with mental health. Because if it were, things like this wouldn’t be happening.

But these initiatives simply aren’t enough if the colleges, who have the most power, continue to be led and handled by people who couldn’t care less.

We also need to question what it is about the Oxford environment that takes people to this unhappy place so frequently. Rather than simply supplying support for cases of inevitable depression and anxiety, Oxford could deal with the root causes of their depression and anxiety.

For many, a real sense of unhappiness and isolation comes from being made to feel unwelcome. Unwelcome because of their cultural background, unwelcome because of the colour of their skin, unwelcome because of the way they speak, unwelcome because of their gender, unwelcome because they have a physical condition that limits them, unwelcome because they are struggling with mental health… This sense of isolation that so many feel has a lot to do with the university’s failure to truly expand into all echelons of society. If Oxford didn’t look so homogenous, those that don’t quite fit the general mould wouldn’t feel so disenfranchised. Though the university prides itself on saying that it offers lots of bursaries and has a great access programme, the things that I’ve mentioned above that make it so emblematic of elitism do put many people that are cut off from this privilege feel marginalised.

             We also have to consider how Oxford’s toxic pressure-cooker environment can take people to breaking point. The terms last only 8 weeks, yet in that time the average Oxford student does more work than some people might do in two 12-week terms. The intensity of an Oxford term even means people regularly talk about “5^th and 6^th week blues”. It’s talked about as though it’s a given that during an Oxford term you will get unhappy, extremely drained and fed up. It is not normal that unhappiness and stress should be so much a part and parcel of your degree – at least, almost nowhere else.

 I talked about the amount of work that we had to do with my fellow linguist friends after our finals and we realised that out of all the books we had to study for our Final Honours School, we could only be examined on about a third of them. So why did we have to study that much? Some say, for the pursuit of knowledge. Look, it’s great to learn, but when it means that the amount that you are learning consistently makes people feel overwhelmed and not only unable to continue with their studies, but with their lives, I think we should start to re-examine how high on the priority ladder we are placing “the pursuit of knowledge”.

Change really needs to come to Oxford, and fast. We can’t afford to have more lives lost or afflicted in this way.

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Reflections on Oxford: Conclusion.