This story is a part of “The Loneliness Project,” a collaboration between The Ithaca Voice,WRFI, The Cornell Daily Sun and the Ithaca College Park Scholars Program. In a series of long-form online articles and multimedia, we will take a careful look at loneliness and its impact on mental health in Tompkins County. This fall, we will examine increasing reports of loneliness among young people nationally and what students are facing locally. Engaged Cornell and The Sophie Fund are funding this collaboration. Read more from the editors here.
ITHACA, N.Y. — Hundreds of graduate students at Cornell have signed a petition urging the university to improve mental health services.
Just below the steps of Cornell Health on Wednesday, about 100 students gathered for a rally organized by Cornell Graduate Students United calling for several demands to improve mental health on campus including an external, public review of mental health services.
As the Cornell Chimes rang at noon, several people voiced experiences of students struggling to get the mental health care they need during their graduate studies.
“While I’ve been here on campus I’ve learned there are some really valuable mental health resources here, but unfortunately in their current state, they can only really reach a few graduate students, and basically only if you’re in crisis,” said Thea Kozakis, a Ph.D. student in the department of astronomy and space sciences.
Within Cornell Health on campus is Counseling & Psychological Services, or CAPS. In recent years, more students have been seeking mental health care. In 2016-17, CAPS provided care to 21 percent of Cornell students, up from 13 percent in 2005-06, according to a Cornell Chronicle article. CAPS provides services including crisis counseling and intervention, group counseling and psychiatry.
Kozakis said when she was struggling with mental health in her third year, she had reached a point when she couldn’t cope or function. She said she was told to go through Counseling & Psychological Services at Cornell, which she did. She said she had to wait a week for a phone assessment through CAPS.
“You might hear in mental health, sometimes you really do just have to live day by day, but I was in such a severe crisis state that I was sort of living minute by minute, and there were a lot of minutes in that week leading up to my assessment,” Kozakis said. “I honestly don’t know how I got through that.”
Others echoed the concern that people often have to reach a crisis point before they can get services.
There have been calls for better mental health services at universities beyond Cornell, too. More and more, the mental health crisis among college-age adults has been brought to the surface of public attention, through articles detailing tragedies at universities, and statistics that show suicide is the second-leading cause of death for people between the ages of 10 and 34 and many students struggle with depression, anxiety and thoughts of suicide.
The Sophie Fund, a nonprofit organization established to support mental health initiatives for young people in Tompkins County, has raised concerns with Cornell’s policies and procedures around mental health and recently sent a letter to University President Martha Pollack. The Sophie Fund was established by Scott MacLeod and Susan Hack after their daughter, Sophie, succumbed to her depression in 2016. At the time, Sophie was on a medical leave from Cornell University.
In a letter in August to Pollack, MacLeod and Hack called on Cornell to appoint an independent task force to examine how the university can provide “the best possible mental health policies, practices, and programs for a large student community located in a small town in rural upstate New York.”
In the petition, Cornell graduate students also call for a public, external review of mental health services in response to the university doing an internal review with the Jed Foundation. Currently, Cornell University says it is working on meeting the demand for mental health services. In September, Ryan Lombardi, vice president for student and campus life, said Cornell Health will be adding counselors, expanding services and planning a new comprehensive review of mental health policies, the Cornell Daily Sun reported. Early this year, Lombardi was quoted in the Cornell Chronicle saying delivery of mental health services is a top priority for the university.
Among six demands, the graduate students are asking the university to improve the therapy referrals process “to match the quality of the physical health referral process,” reinstate the gym membership reimbursement, mandate annual sensitivity training for advisers, increase offerings for graduate student-specific therapy, and mandate training for CAPS providers to “develop skills and awareness necessary to effectively support LGBTQIAA+ students and students of color.”
At the rally Wednesday after a few graduate students took turns speaking, they marched up Ho Plaza toward the clock tower before turning up toward East Avenue to Day Hall, where the president’s office is located. They disrupted the quiet of the third floor, chanting “Work shouldn’t hurt.” Though they wanted to deliver their petition that has just over 900 signatures to Pollack and Provost Michael Kotlikoff directly, they had to settle with handing it over to a secretary as both were not available. They also dropped off a bag of coal for the president before heading out.
In a statement, Joel Malina, vice president for university relations, said, “We look forward to reviewing the petition and to continuing our efforts to promote a positive climate for mental health at Cornell.”
Alessandro Powell, communications director for CGSU, said many people think of unions as representing people who do physical labor but said: “graduate student workers, however, face a more subtle danger at work.”
“We work with our minds. Whether we research, write, or teach, this work is constant. We take it home with us every night (assuming we are not pulling all-nighters, anyway, or crashing on lounge couches as many of us do). This constant mental strain, though often creative and exhilarating, grinds away at us, building stress. As workers who put their bodies on the line fought for and won physical protections like workers compensation, graduate workers at Cornell and across the country are demanding similar support for the mental work we do,” Powell said. “We are proud of the work we do to help make Cornell one of the best schools in the world, but in order for the University to succeed the graduate students who perform much of the labor need stability and a strong mental health safety net.”
In the petition, CGSU said they want to meet with Pollack and Kotlikoff before Feb. 1, 2019.
Ithaca Voice Reporter Mitchell Wajda contributed to this report.
Featured image: Natalie Hofmeister, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in ecology and evolutionary biology. (Photo by Kelsey O’Connor/The Ithaca Voice)