In an emailed statement to The Crimson in May 2013, HUHS Director Paul J. Barreira and SMHS Chief Katherine A. Lapierre wrote that UHS is prepared to help with any “minor or serious, newly acquired, or long-standing” mental health concerns. And in a Crimson op-ed published in March 2013, Barriera wrote that many UHS patients said that “once they were in the system they felt that they received great care.”

In the op-ed, Barreira shared the results from three national leaders who conducted an outside review of SMHS, which found that “there is a perception that SMHS is not working solely for the administration.” This view that SMHS is responsive to students has led “the University community [to trust] that the SMHS is there for the care of students,” he continued.

But David expressed concern that UHS is not working solely for the student and sees itself also working for University administration.

“[HUHS has] to weigh on one hand the health and medical interests of the patient, but on the other hand the safety and liability concerns at the University,” David said, later saying that in his opinion UHS makes decisions “in a medical context for non-medical reasons” to safeguard Harvard from potential liability.

LOOMING LIABILITY

Lawsuits against universities have sparked controversy across the country over student suicides, including some against Harvard, MIT, Cornell, and Wesleyan.

The Harvard case surrounds the death of John B. Edwards III ’10, who was a sophomore interested in medicine and training to run the Boston Marathon when he committed suicide in November 2007. In his lawsuit, Edwards’ father contends that the treatment of his son by UHS did not meet medical standards.

In the midst of these lawsuits, Peter F. Lake ’81, a professor at Stetson University College of Law who specializes in higher education law, said that “liability is in the back of people’s minds” when students on campus are dealing with mental health issues.

Yet Ellison said that Harvard only considers “the behavior of the student” and that the risks of being held liable “never” play a role in the decision to send a student home.

Despite what Ellison says, Harvard faces significant legal risk at every step in the process while the student is still on campus. But everything changes when that student goes home.

“You stop the clock on liability when the student leaves,” said Michael A. Olivas, the director of the Institute of Higher Education Law and Governance at the University of Houston.

In particular, Harvard faces liability when it decides whether to forcibly send students home for mental health issues, Lake said.

These instances of involuntary leave rarely occur, however. At Harvard, as well as nationally, only a tiny percentage of students who go on leave for mental health reasons are forced out. Barreira and Lapierre wrote that in mental health cases, “the decision to take a [leave of absence] is the student’s to make, hopefully with the advice and counsel of mental health clinicians as well as their deans.”

In fact, as of 2013, only one student had been placed on an involuntary leave of absence from Harvard for mental health reasons in more than a decade, according to Ellison, and that student eventually asked to convert to a voluntary leave.

But when these cases do crop up, to avoid a lawsuit Harvard must never send someone home involuntarily if they are not dangerous to themselves or others, and it must always send them home if they are, said John Dayton a law professor at the University of Georgia and the director of the Education Law Consortium.