For the past four days, I have been scouring the Internet and calling several people in UCLA administration and Media Relations, asking a simple policy question: Are students ever forcibly withdrawn from school here because of mental health issues?
In February, Newsweek magazine published a widely read and discussed story on the way colleges deal with mental health. The piece, which included an account of a UC Santa Barbara student who was disciplined by her residential community after cutting herself, revealed a concerning pattern of colleges who treat students seeking mental health services like liabilities, often forcing them out of their dorms and involuntarily withdrawing them from the university.
A month earlier, Rachel Williams, a student at Yale University, published an op-ed in Yale Daily News’ Weekend magazine in which she described being involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric hospital and withdrawn from school after revealing she’d had suicidal thoughts.
This week, the Undergraduate Students Association Council Student Wellness Commission is holding Mental Health Awareness Week in conjunction with their launch of All of Us: A Campaign to Rethink Mental Health. The campaign hopes to eventually bring attention to the way colleges treat students with mental health problems.
So, all that in mind, I set out to look at our campus’s policy on involuntary withdrawal.
I expected to hear back quickly – this is, after all, a policy. There has to be a PDF file somewhere with this information in it, or some knowledgeable official who can tell me what it is. Involuntary withdrawal policies have huge potential consequences for students seeking mental health services at the university, and that information should obviously be readily available for anyone seeking it out, right?
I faced a strange and disconcerting number of blocks in my search. I could not find anything online where UCLA posts its policies. The University of California has a model policy for involuntary withdrawal of students who “pose a significant risk of physical harm to oneself or others,” which I was able to find because a colleague had it saved on her computer.
Elizabeth Gong-Guy, the director of UCLA Counseling and Psychological Services, let me know over email that UCLA does not employ involuntary mental health leaves. But I still had questions – if we do not employ involuntary withdrawal at UCLA, what is the protocol for dealing with a student who may harm themselves or others? Why don’t we follow the UC’s model policy, and since we apparently don’t, what exactly is our policy?
I asked UCLA Media Relations for this information, but was only able to get the same fact repeated to me after a significant amount of pressing: UCLA does not suspend students for mental health issues.
First of all, suspension and withdrawal are not the same thing. And furthermore, why isn’t that information easily accessible for students to see?
The lack of information readily available to students who want to know about such an important policy is troubling. That information should be online with other UCLA policies and, in case any student might fail to find it online, handed over at first request by any official who might be contacted about it.
This is particularly true because, while UCLA apparently does not force students to withdraw, the Office of Residential Life can force them out of residence halls. There is a policy posted on the ORL website listed under “sanctions” and “exclusion from on campus housing.” ORL can mandate a student to leave the halls if they exhibit “physical abuse to others or to self” or “threats of violence to others or to self,” including threats of suicide.
If a student tells a Resident Assistant that he or she is having thoughts about suicide, it can trigger a chain of disciplinary events that ends in that student being kicked out of the dorm.
Removing a student from housing may force the student out of classes. Forcing a student out of classes is effectively withdrawing him or her from school.
By now, students are wary of talking with administrators about mental health issues for fear of involuntary withdrawal because the problem has been widely publicized and talked about; however, the possibility that confiding in their Resident Assistant could lead to disciplinary actions that end in their eviction from residential life is not as widely understood.
That policy, too, should be more widely publicized – students should know their RAs are mandated reporters and should understand the disciplinary process they could trigger in trying to seek help. That is a bare minimum to ask, and it’s entirely ignoring the much larger issue that students seeking help are being “sanctioned” and evicted from their dorm rooms like someone who’s repeatedly violated housing regulations.
There is an entirely separate and likely much bigger issue at stake here in discussing the way universities handle mental health cases.
But what’s been equally enraging to me is the strange inaccessibility of information about these disciplinary policies.
Allowing students to stumble into consequences they did not foresee is unacceptable. Seeking help should not be the equivalent of walking blindly into the dark – students should know what they’re getting themselves into, and not find themselves in even bigger trouble after seeking help.