Wilkes’ friends noticed something was wrong, and his resident tutor e-mailed him to suggest another leave of absence. But he says he was beyond caring about his recovery and decided that staying in school would be easier than going through the withdrawal process yet again.

Finally, Wilkes actually wrote the suicide note, and took it to his tutor.

Wilkes says his visit to the tutor that weekend was his cry for help—and it went unanswered. Though his friend did take him to UHS, Wilkes says the incident with his tutor, and the persistent distance between him and his residential advisers following his one year of therapy, left him thinking that no one at Harvard cared enough to help him.

He took a second leave of absence soon after, and has not returned to school.

Wilkes’ experiences with Bean, his proctor and his tutors by no means represent all students’ interactions with advisers in the College residential system. Student interaction with tutors is extremely variable—some say their residential and academic advisers have been caring and helpful in dealing with their mental health problems, while others say they’ve never even met them.

And students say the response of residential advisers, teaching fellows and professors to mental health problems can have an overwhelming influence on recovery.

“In my experience, the presence of caring and accessible tutors…has quite literally been the difference between despair and success,” Elizabeth J. Quinn ’04 wrote in a letter to administrators about mental health services.

But the current College system—comprised of residential and academic advisers whose level of training and interest in helping students with mental health problems varies widely—makes finding that crucial support a gamble.

Health in the House

Katherine T. Kleindienst ’05 says her academic adviser and sophomore tutorial leader was “unquestionably the biggest figure” in getting her help for her depression.

After spring break last year, Kleindienst says she felt inexplicably sad even though everything in her life was going well. She had just been placed in a higher crew boat and her grades for the semester were better than usual.

Around that time, her tutor e-mailed Kleindienst about academics and also asked more generally about how she was doing. Kleindienst confided that she had been feeling depressed, and her tutor scheduled her an appointment at UHS.

“Would I have gone to UHS myself? I doubt it,” Kleindienst says. “Especially when you’re depressed, you’re not taking very much initiative for anything. It really does take someone from the outside saying, ‘I think maybe you do have a problem.’”

UHS Mental Health Services Director Richard D. Kadison says tutors or other administrators can often successfully encourage students who may be unwilling to seek help or to enter treatment.

He says that it’s “very common” for House administrators to refer a student to UHS for care, estimating that several times a week a tutor or proctor will make an appointment for a student with UHS Mental Health Service.