Perhaps the greatest problem that the Psychiatric Service will face in coming years is the ability to communicate with the wide variety of students who go to Harvard. The most common complaint among students who have rejected the counseling they found at UHS is that it is narrow minded. Although not all of them use exactly this phrase, most of the dissatisfied feel that the Establishment doesn't understand them and thus is incapable of helping them.

For example students who take drugs at the University know that they will be received with open arms at the Health Center, but they may have heard stories about psychiatrists lecturing students on the "problem of pot." Most drug-users don't consider pot a problem, but rather feel that the society which sees pot as a problem is sick.

Since 1958 the suicide rate at Harvard has remained fairly constant at two or three a year... the number of attempted suicides still remains at an incredibly high 10 to 25 annually.

Many of these students are not "far-out heads" but perfectly normal people who have a different value orientation from the doctors they meet at UHS. And it is not only drugs which separate these students from their doctors--many have ideological and moral differences which cut them off from psychiatric help.

Outside Advice

As a result most of these students either don't go to UHS or else quickly abandon the psychiatrist they have been assigned. Some of these students--popularly considered the alienated fringe but probably closer to the norm at Harvard than elsewhere--find sympathetic listeners in the Soc Rel Department; others have talked with Robert M. Coles, research psychiatrist to UHS.

If UHS psychiatrists are going to cater to all of Harvard, they will have to learn to be more open minded; they will have to make their definition of sickness a little more elastic. They will, in effect, have to become a little more hip