LogFAQs > #973023745

Mental health resources. Mental health 'management.' That's what you're offered at university, they send out these emails any time there's a high profile shooting in the news or if a student dies on campus or there was a hate crime or it's finals week.

Last week one of my professors ceded some of lecture time to a lady who is the 'director of student support' who had a whole PowerPoint about how much sleep you should try to get, what you should eat or drink, how much physical activity you should get.

And this really steamed me because I realized that the office of student support is a lie. The meta-message behind 'resources' about 'managing' mental health is that it's actually all on you. If you fail, whether you fail on a test or drop a class or drop out of college or die or anything. The message is that you didn't utilize your resources effectively, you are a poor manager of your mental health.

But it's not just that the systems in college and American life as a whole are not sufficiently designed to accommodate mental health. It's that these systems, including the ones of this college, are designed to not accommodate people struggling. And that makes these offers of resources so insidious because they're part of that system that lays the blame on you. That if you can't adapt to the artificialities and constructions in our society then it's because you just don't have the constitution for it, and you're led to never examine the core systems for problems.