During exams, just a few months later, she was hospitalized for a week in Stillman Infirmary, diagnosed with clinical depression. She was in danger of failing out of school.

And Melissa is not the only one. All too often, students report, Harvard's mental health resources fail to fulfill their needs. The results, they say, can be devastating.

In November, the office of Provost Harvey V. Fineberg '67 released a report on the status of Harvard's mental health resources documents what students have known for years through their friends' experiences and their own: UHS is often inaccessible and removed from the undergraduate community. Although mental health services remain less than ideal, UHS says it's doing its best to respond to the report, especially by making more resources available to students.

More geared to student needs, the BSC has provided patients with what they haven't found at UHS--opportunities to chat with counselors for long periods of time. But other students say BSC therapy is often all talk--and little help.

Until these problems can be solved, students say they're not sure where to turn.

The Quiet One

This May marks the five-year anniversary of the infamous murder-suicide in Dunster House, in which Sinedu Tadesse, Class of 1996, stabbed her roommate, Trang Phuong Ho, also Class of 1996, and then hung herself.

A year after the incident, a report surfaced Tadesse's Harvard file contained a letter she had written to a UHS psychologist saying she was "desperate" with emotional problems. It did not seem that Harvard ever took action directly in response to the letter. She had been in UHS therapy for three years.