Black informally surveyed House open lists about students’ experiences with mental health services.

“There needs to be some sort of way of tracking people’s progress,” Black says. “We don’t want people going to UHS, getting scared off and committing suicide. We can’t have the problem of people getting lost in the system.”

Kadison admits that UHS does sometimes lose track of students.

“Our policy is to follow up appointments with an e-mail—that’s what’s supposed to happen. But unfortunately, not everyone does it,” he says. “Sometimes students are just sent to the front desk to schedule appointments. Some providers don’t feel comfortable with the system.”

Kadison estimates that two percent of students come in for an appointment and then don’t receive a follow-up e-mail or call.

About 25 percent of students who visit UHS mental health services come in only once, Kadison says. He has also instituted a policy of e-mailing students to remind them of previously scheduled appointments, an improvement which he says has cut no-shows in half.

“We were losing 3,000 visits a year—15 percent of all appointments—it was a big loss and we’ve made major progress on that,” Kadison says.

But some say that in order to get adequate care, students need to be aggressive and focused—exactly what many troubled students in need of the most care cannot be.

A Harvard senior says that after reading articles about MIT student Elizabeth Shin, who committed suicide in 2000, he was struck by the similar pitfalls in the Harvard system.

“No one was keeping track of her when she was going in and out of these resources…the system failed her,” he says. “I also had some problems sophomore year, and when I read about her, it really scared me, because probably the exact same thing would have happened to me, except I came from a background where I was well-informed and proactive about taking responsibility to stay in treatment when I needed it.”

—Staff writer Katharine A. Kaplan can be reached at kkaplan@fas.harvard.edu.