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 make 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.

Reflections on Oxford Series Part 7: Finals.

                          Strong men tremble when they hear it / They’ve got cause enough to fear it!

                - Bill Sikes, My Name, Oliver!

Finals. I had heard enough about them in the three years before I had to do them, and seen people crumbling under the pressure they brought. I took comfort in the fact that I could do three-quarters of my degree without having to engage with them. I waived them at every opportunity between 2013 and October 2016. And then finals came knocking at my doorstep.

And Ruth Akinradewo turned into a different person.

Never have I ever experienced so much pressure and stress, and I have promised to NEVER again do that to myself. For my sake as well as the sake of the people around me who know and love me.

I’ve poked fun at it, but honestly, stress in Oxford is not a joke. And finals – the final examinations in which all the skills and knowledge you’ve accumulated in the years of your degree to date are really put to the test – take that stress level to an all-time high.

I got to repeating a mantra to myself in my final year as the pressure in the pressure-cooker got to an unbearable degree: Oxford, you did not bring me into this world and you will not take me out.

I posted it as a Facebook status on a day I was particularly feeling the pressure, and I think it made a lot of people laugh – and honestly when I had come up with that declaration it had been in part jest, but as things got more and more intense it really became less and less of a joke and a real, simple way of talking sense into myself when I felt like I was losing my senses.

I’m a Christian and so I believe that Jesus has the answer to all of my struggles and in Him lies the solution to allay all my fears. Yet I knew that I was going to need to be reminded of this a LOT more than usual to get through finals in one piece. Consequently, I had posters all over my wall with some of the key verses to remind me of God’s peace. And I STILL fell apart.

It seemed ridiculous, really. So many times I had to talk to myself and say, “Ruth, look, you’ve been through this and this and this, are you really going to let Oxford break you?” No matter how hard it could be, Oxford did not give me life and so it wasn’t going to take it from me. My life wasn’t going to fall apart because of Oxford. It really wasn’t that deep.

That’s what the theory was. In practice, it was pretty hard to exercise calmness and faith and all that good stuff.

I had fourteen exams. Fourteen.

Four in the first week of final term, and ten more over a two-week period in the fifth and sixth week of term. On top of that, in the previous term I submitted two near-8,000 word dissertation-like projects – on the same day. It’s not hard to see why the pressure got to me and got the better of me.

You speak to any Oxford graduate about finals and they will tell you they were intense.

Pressure and stress took different forms for different people. In my case, it made me withdrawn, pretty low, indecisive, anxious, an insomniac, unable to see the bigger picture, work-obsessed. I use the expression “I nearly killed myself” in more than one sense.

As someone that is usually upbeat, cheerful and a laughoholic, this version of myself couldn’t really be more different to my real self. For some time I hid myself away because I felt like I was supposed to have it all together. As the Christian, wasn’t I supposed to be showing everyone else how to do finals whilst balancing green tea on my head, living in a haze of peaceful serenity whilst everyone else was tearing their hair out? (I may do a post about struggling with depression as a Christian another time.)

I don’t think the stress of finals being the straw that broke the camel’s back was about me not being Christian enough. I think it revealed the tension at play between being human and doing Oxford finals.

This just wasn’t normal. I was someone who had gone through 10 GCSEs, 4 A-Levels and the AQA Baccalaureate, and numerous music and drama exams. I had done Prelims in my first year as well. Coping with exam stress and pressure wasn’t new to me. But I had never reacted like this.

After handing in my two big projects, I took one day off and then threw myself into revision for my finals. I was two weeks into the Easter break but I decided to stay in Oxford to revise to optimum level.

Those 2 big projects - done!

The first two weeks went really well. I enjoyed re-reading the books I’d enjoyed in my second year, getting to read them without the thought of having to write an essay on them imminently.

Then I don’t know what happened. Well, actually I do. I started suffering from a serious case of anxiety.

            There were too many books! How was I going to get through all of these works of literature in the six weeks I had left? And know the quotes by heart, the themes at the flick of a light switch? And Dante, DANTE...

Dante = Italy’s answer to Shakespeare.

My my, another reason doing Italian added to my struggles.

Dante Alighieri, frankly a brilliant poet, should rightly be studied, I’m not disputing that. His Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy) is an awe-inspiring work made up of three volumes: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, documenting his vision of realms of the afterlife.

But do I regret that we had to study three 700-page volumes of medieval Italian? Yes. Yes, yes, and yes. When I picked the module that celebrated the greatest of Italy’s writers, I thought about how I would be studying some of the most influential literature in Europe, and at that, literature that celebrated God and Heaven. Plus to be honest, it was clear that all the Italian tutors wanted you to pick it.

Did I think about how I was going to have to revise all of it? No. Did I think about how I was going to have to translate medieval Italian in my exam? No. Did I think about how I was going to have to learn line-by-line verses of ancient Italian? No.

My mum thinks it was Dante that really submerged me in panic. Maybe so: there’s no doubt that having three volumes of 700+ page works in medieval Italian was not exactly a recipe for tranquillity.

BUT… There are people that never had to read Dante that can relate to my experience of anxiety.

After two weeks of my revision going well, I became unable to sleep. It’s true that I have struggled with sleep disturbance in the past, but this was quite different. Night after night, I would get no more than 2 hours’ sleep – not because I had gone to bed at 4am, but because I was lying in bed consumed by stress about work and exams and my mind simply would not go to sleep.

The sleeplessness was probably the biggest battle during finals. I was already waking up at 6:30 to start work latest by 8am, and ending my working day at 10pm. I was working all day. To be honest, I quite relished the idea of sleep as a way to get away from the constant slog of work. And now even that was being taken away from me?

And of course, when you don’t sleep well, you don’t work well. I found myself falling asleep at my desk during the day because I was tired. Then I would feel I had to do more work because falling asleep wasn’t factored into my schedule!

                I more or less stopped having fun because of my finals. I stepped back a little from choir, I stopped going to my church’s weekly student nights and just went to church on Sundays, I completely stopped athletics in my final year… I’m not saying that it wasn’t sensible to scale back some of my activities to give myself more time to revise, and make sure I wasn’t spreading myself thinly between too much but rather giving more to what I could manage at a particular time, but the sense of wanting to do well meant I really couldn’t see further than my finals. My wellbeing was suffering.

                The irony is, all the wanting to do well and worrying about not doing well enough, was stopping me from doing well! Worry and anxiety of this nature consumes you and actually massively destabilises and even paralyses you. As a result, I would sit in the library from 8-10am staring at my books and my notes and not making any sense of them, or barely writing three sentences on my spreadsheet.

                The change in me was so apparent to my mum, my friends, my pastors and my tutors that they stepped in in full force to do whatever they could to help. I really couldn’t have gotten through it without them. I got on my own nerves with the state I was in, so I don’t know how they managed to deal with me as kindly and understandingly as they did.

I wasn’t planning to go home until Easter weekend, but my mum got me to come home THREE times in the week before then because I really needed some help. I was being so irrational. I remember when I got home, saying to my mum and one of my friends over and over again, “I’m gonna fail. I’m gonna fail.” The reality is, that was completely untrue – despite how badly my revision was going, my results in mock exams a couple of weeks later were still far from fails.

My experience is not that different to a lot of finalists.

We all knew how awful finals were and mutual support and encouragement came through then like no other time. Every time you met a fellow finalist, you would boost each other by saying: “You can do it, I believe in you! We can do this!” (Because of course you had to encourage yourself as well.) One of my friends and I, having a particularly rough day in the library, joked that we could make a mixtape of the amount of times we’d sighed! Every time the other sighed and put her head on the table in total despair, the other would say “Are you OK?” and then after lamenting together for a few minutes, we’d pick up our pens and start working again. You saw the best of humanity and people coming together during finals, honestly. We were all carrying the horrible burden together.

               Every single one of my friends, from what I can remember, turned into a different person over finals. Many of us struggled with insomnia and had to get prescribed sleeping tablets during exam season in order to be able to rest. Even with my sleeping tablets, I was sleepy in more than a few of my exams.

Angst, irritability, depression, indecisiveness, frustration, panic… I mean, it was different for each person but generally finals weren’t the happiest times of our lives.

See how happy I was post-exams??!

Oxford finals can actually get so unbearable that year in, year out, a large number of people decide to rusticate. Actually, this doesn’t just happen before finals, but can happen at any point during one’s degree. Rustication is when a student takes a year out of their degree for health reasons. It can be because of physical health, but more and more frequently now it is linked to mental health. I heard twelve lawyers in my final year rusticated in the two weeks before their nine exams, because it was just getting to be too much. 

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Part 8: Oxford and Mental Health.