Next week is mental health awareness week.
As universities across the country are navigating a series of crises regarding mental health and higher education – including a loss of funding for mental health resources due to the expiration of Proposition 63 in California and nationwide debate about involuntary psychiatric withdrawal policies – UCLA student government offices will hold a number of events next week that foster an ongoing conversation about mental health.
For its part in this student-driven conversation, UCLA administration has failed to communicate clearly with the student body, particularly in regards to its policies on mental health involuntary withdrawal.
A few weeks ago, I embarked on a search for UCLA’s policy on mental health withdrawal, consulting various web pages and asking numerous sources the same question: Are students at UCLA ever forcibly removed from school because of mental health issues?
I had considerable difficulty obtaining an answer to my question, but I eventually got a rather confusing one. While UCLA spokesman Tod Tamberg told me that the university does not employ involuntary psychiatric withdrawal from the university, I found a policy listed on UCLA Residential Life’s website that specified suicidal ideation or attempts could result in eviction from housing. Evicting a student from housing essentially amounts to withdrawing them from the university. I wrote about that confusing mix of policies in the column I had been reporting for.
After that column published, Elizabeth Gong-Guy, the director of Counseling and Psychological Services, and Suzanne Seplow, the assistant vice chancellor for student development, wrote a submission to the Daily Bruin in which they said I’d misunderstood the “the intent and the spirit” of the housing policy, and that the policy was “primarily” used in instances when the student posed a risk of danger to others, not to themselves.
A short time later, Residential Life changed the wording of that policy to remove all references to self harm or suicide and made no effort to inform anyone of the change, casting it as a “clarification” of policy that had been missed in previous updates of housing regulations.
Despite what I have been told over and over again by UCLA, that series of events does not constitute to me a clear delineation of policy.
To start with, I find it questionable that Residential Life missed that language in its updates and that policy was merely updated to comport with practice. Gong-Guy and Seplow’s submission addresses the policy as it is, making no mention of incorrect wording or imminent updates to the language. They, in fact, say that the policy is “primarily” used when a student poses a risk to others, which in my mind clearly implies that it’s sometimes used when the student poses a risk to themselves.
Furthermore, the changes to the policy are unclear. As a recent Daily Bruin editorial pointed out, the wording of the policy changed from specifying harm to “others or self,” to specifying harm to “any person,” which could well include oneself. That kind of vagueness is unacceptable for a policy that could have such drastic effects for students, especially because the interpretation of that policy is entirely up to administrators.
Lastly and most troublingly, no written policy about involuntary mental health withdrawal exists at UCLA. Administrators have simply said that UCLA does not do it. The only semblance of a policy on this matter existed only within Residential Life and suggested, until about two weeks ago, that the university evict people for suicidal ideation or attempts.
If UCLA does not in fact employ involuntary withdrawal either through housing or through the university itself, the university owes it to the student body to be more explicit about that fact than it has been. UCLA should adopt a written, uniform policy for campus and for the Hill that specifies its practice with regard to mental health withdrawal – and that policy should explicitly state that we do not withdraw students in any capacity for suicidal ideation or attempts. No matter what the university does in practice, students are not offered real, substantive protection unless the policy is written down and readily accessible.
And the university owes us that protection. Mental health issues affect large proportions of college students and it’s important that information on mental health policy be made widely available.
UCLA has a responsibility to us that merely stating policies does not fulfill.