Trigger Warning: This article contains mention of mental illness and suicide that some may find distressing.
“Went straight through in four years,” wrote Elliott Smith when asked about his time at Hampshire College, “I guess it proved to myself that I could do something I really didn’t want to for four years. Except I did like what I was studying. At the time it seemed like, ‘this is your one and only chance to go to college and you had just better do it because someday you might wish that you did.’” He would go on to join a collection of Five College graduates (Sylvia Plath, David Foster-Wallace) whose artistic and intellectual contributory potential was eclipsed by intense and debilitating depression, and die by suicide at the age of thirty-four.
30 years after Elliott Smith’s graduation from Hampshire, college students are largely struggling: 44% of students nationally report symptoms of anxiety and depression, and suicide is a leading cause of death for our age group, hovering around second place after accidents and before cancer.
“Excellent Sheep” by William Deresiewicz details the way that prestigious colleges scoop up bright kids only to hollow them out with ruthless course-loads, high expectations and pedagogical approaches that emphasize spectacular achievement over varied exploration. According to Deresiewicz’ account of teaching at Yale and other universities, students are extraordinarily deft at crafting a resume or acing their finals, but falter on simple questions like, “what makes you passionate?”
I’ve been fortunate to avoid much of the fallout of higher-ed’s depression problem. The stories from my friends at Columbia—“the suicide announcement emails are just templates they plug new names into”—and my parents’ horror stories of ’90’s deans who would shoo suicidal students out of their offices feel pretty alien. In a sense, Smith culturally gets past much of this, just consult any of the hundreds of forum posts for prospective students calling us “Harvard but chill” or any such other assertion of the work-hard, play-hard image for which we have earned a sort of reputation. But walking down by Mill River on Halloween last weekend, I found a note someone had left on the ground that read, “please try not to kill yourself,” and looked up to a spot where Sylvia Plath sat and wrote in her journal detailing bouts of depression leading up to her suicide at thirty, and I wasn’t sure.
There is a a self-flagellating zeal that accompanies American ideals about what a genius ought to be; Plath’s Wikipedia page bears a header that reads “college years and depression,” and indeed much of her legacy, like Elliott Smith’s, is bound up in a sort of romanticization of her misery. Part of this is hers; her body of work focuses on the logic of oppression and misery more than liberation.
What’s pertinent is the larger scope of what Plath means for how we envision over-achieving students. Was Plath a successful student? She graduated summa from Smith, was published young and is canonized as one of the greatest women writers of the 20th century. She also killed herself abruptly at the very beginning of her career. Can we consider our successful students successful if they are miserable? Is it wrong for institutions like Smith to sacrifice students’ achievement on the altar of their mental stability? I don’t exactly subscribe to the view that mental wellness ought to coddle– college at its best should challenge us, change us through our pursuit of what is only partially in view. Sometimes that means pulling an all-nighter. It doesn’t have to mean death.
I often think about this during Autumn. It’s too cold to go out; soon students will huddle indoors more and sleep less, fewer excuses available to distract from the relentless pressure of work. This is not an issue that will be solved overnight, nor should it be. But we should acknowledge the legacy of mental illness in higher education, specifically at Smith.
