One Eliot House resident couldn’t finish his term papers because of depression and severe anxiety. Another missed three final exams because of a personal meltdown. A third stopped submitting work for his tutorial and skipped a final exam because of what Eliot Senior Tutor Oona B. Ceder called, “some kind of failure across the board.”

“I am swamped,” Ceder wrote in an e-mail to Eliot House Master Lino Pertile last May about these and the 20 other Eliot residents she called “our troubled students.”

The next morning, a concerned Pertile forwarded the e-mail to University President Lawrence H. Summers.

“This blows my mind,” Summers responded to Pertile. “Is this typical?”

It is.

A six-month investigation by The Crimson has found that the College faces a pervasive mental health crisis and that, because of systemic problems with its mental health resources, Harvard is failing to adequately treat its students.

An overwhelming majority of Harvard undergraduates struggle with mental health problems, a recent Crimson poll found.

“The breadth of the problem we are having with the mental health of our undergraduates struck me as reaching such serious proportions that I felt I wanted to share it with you,” Pertile wrote in his original e-mail to Summers. “The trouble that is brewing under the apparently calm surface is a cause for concern.”

Summers asked if the number of problems in Eliot House was unusual.

“Matters do seem to be worse this year,” Pertile wrote back in the e-mail exchange obtained by The Crimson. “We do not think that Eliot House is untypical.”

Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby asked then-Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68 if the volume of cases in Eliot House was out of the ordinary.

“Seems high,” Kirby wrote. “But students do fail.”

Lewis, who served as dean for eight years, responded that the situation was typical.

“I don’t have much sense that this year is abnormal,” Lewis wrote.

When contacted this weekend, these administrators declined to comment further about the situation in Eliot last spring. Kirby could not be reached for comment last night.