Under the Surface

The Crimson poll found that 80 percent of undergraduates felt depressed at least once last year. Forty-seven percent felt so depressed it was difficult to function at least once. Ten percent said they had seriously considered committing suicide.

The poll surveyed a random sample of Harvard College students over a four-day period in December; 361 students responded to the poll, which was administered online via a secure, authenticated server. Statistics had a margin of error of plus or minus six percentage points.

“We must admit as a University that we have a problem,” says Hilary C. Robinson ’03, a first-year student at Harvard Law School who went to University Health Services (UHS) Mental Health Service this fall and says she was shocked to learn how overburdened UHS is with students seeking therapy.

Undergraduates have started to realize how common mental illness is at the College, according to Director of UHS Mental Health Service Dr. Richard D. Kadison.

“Harvard students are getting better at realizing that mental health problems here are normal,” he says.

But a 2003 graduate of the College who suffered from a severe anxiety disorder while at Harvard says most students don’t realize that even those who appear to be thriving could be suffering from mental illness.

“I’m not someone you would look at and think, ‘That girl is crazy,’” says the graduate, who asked that her name not be used.

Even close friends, she says, didn’t know that she was sick.

“Inside, I was feeling like I was going to choke, or pass out, or die,” she says.

She shopped dozens of classes, frequently burst into tears for no apparent reason and sometimes slept in her closet because “it felt safe.”

She saw several UHS clinicians, tried half a dozen medications and took two months off from school to try to cope with her severe anxiety.

By her junior year, she was a self-described “pill popper” and visited a UHS-affiliated clinician three times per week.

“I was a straight-A student at Harvard who was insane,” she says.

Marian H. Smith, a member of the Class of 2004, was only 19 when she committed suicide in her Winthrop House dorm room last fall.