In the past, tutor selection and training was completely controlled by individual Houses, causing a wide variation in quality.

Now, all tutors attend a standard three-day training session at the beginning of the year that includes panels with UHS mental health clinicians such as Kadison. MHAAG also hosts a series of tutor training panels to raise awareness about identifying and helping students with mental health concerns, and some Houses continue to hold optional panels on mental health care during the year.

New senior tutors receive a week of training over the summer about House issues, with one day devoted to mental health, according to Assistant Dean of the College John T. O’Keefe, who helps organize tutor training across the College. Counselors from UHS and the Bureau of Study Counsel speak to the senior tutors and take them on a tour of UHS.

Each House also has a liaison at UHS and the bureau whom tutors can consult about mental health and whom House Masters can invite to monthly meetings with tutors.

But Quinn says tutors should be trained to play a more comprehensive role in student mental health.

“People talk about this as a pipeline. Tutors screen and say, ‘UHS,’ and the problem is taken care of,” she says. “But if you really want to help this person, it’s a reciprocal relationship, where the tutor really knows about UHS, but also residential support, keeping lines of communication open, and just being here.”

The uniform training program has not produced enough awareness of the mental health problems Harvard faces, according to Quinn.

Senior Tutors

As more students seek help with mental health problems, senior tutors have been forced to become almost full-time mental health counselors while juggling their other duties, both within and outside the House.

Senior tutors are responsible for overseeing the academic and social lives of the approximately 400 students in the House. They serve as liaisons between the Masters and students, oversee the House tutors and run pre-law and pre-med programs and fellowship applications.

But with approximately 80 percent of respondents to the Crimson poll reporting that they have felt depressed while at Harvard, senior tutors are now forced to deal with a host of academic and social problems rooted in mental illness.

The situation in Eliot House during exams last spring, when around two dozen students faced academic problems—many due to mental health problems—spotlights the severe burden placed on senior tutors.

Last May, Eliot Senior Tutor Oona B. Ceder sent an e-mail to Eliot House Master Lino Pertile telling him about what she called Eliot’s “troubled students.”

Ceder wrote that she was “swamped in student troubles” and went on to describe a hectic two weeks of tracking down students for their parents, mediating between undergraduates and teaching fellows and keeping tabs on students with severe mental health problems.

Shocked by the extent of student problems—and Ceder’s struggles—Pertile forwarded the e-mail to University President Lawrence H. Summers.