When Najya Williams ’20 got to Dunster House, she felt she had hit a wall.
“Here I am, someone who thrived in high school, juggling a lot of different pressures. Here I am, at a place where I am deemed one of the best in the world and country,” she said. “And I can’t handle it. What does that say about me? How are people looking at me? I’m embarrassed to ask for help, ashamed to say that I’m struggling. Not only the expectations I felt were being placed on me externally, but also the expectations that I set for myself were just crushing.”
According to Williams, there has not been a “large concerted effort” to talk about mental health in Dunster. When she arrived as a sophomore, House administrators emailed with offers of support. Tutors hosted weekly study breaks. Resources existed, but Williams still described feeling that her support system had cut in half after her first year. “And I’m still supposed to smile and show up,” she said.
Meanwhile, at neighboring Mather House this past October, faculty deans Amala and L. Mahadevan declared mental health their first priority — launching, among other initiatives, weekly visits from Counseling and Mental Health Services, extensive programming for a second annual Mental Health and Well-being Week, and other responses to a comprehensive house-wide survey. When the HPR asked Williams how these efforts would have impacted her experience, she said, “I definitely feel like I wouldn’t have felt as alone.”
The 12 Houses are the communities in which most Harvard College sophomores, juniors, and seniors live. Purportedly, the randomized housing assignment each student receives should not determine the quality of their Harvard experience. However, on student issues as important as mental health, the Houses are unequal; being assigned to Dunster or Mather or any other House could significantly impact a student’s well-being. It is time for all of our House leaders to choose to step up — and if they do not, Harvard’s administration should require them to change.
Harvard’s Mental Health Crisis
For many students, mental health is a clinical matter, and the stakes are high. Globally, depression is the leading cause of disability. In the United States, where suicide is the second leading cause of death among students, 39 percent of college students experience a significant mental health issue and two thirds of students with anxiety or depression do not seek treatment. Williams’ feeling also is not uncommon at Harvard. “[People] worry that who they are — as people, as academicians — don’t actually rise to the honor that they have been given,” Ramona Dvorak, a psychiatrist in behavioral health at Harvard University Health Services, explained to the HPR. “We see a fair amount of imposter syndrome … and then that becomes problematic with their psychological state.”
For what Dvorak termed a “crisis,” Harvard is not treating it like one. According to Dvorak, there is a “devastating stigma that prevents many people from accessing the help that they need.” The association of therapy with being “crazy,” a fear that medication will turn students “into another person, a zombie,” the perception that depression is a matter of “moral failing” rather than “a serious mind-body illness,” and the treatment of mental health as an issue separate from our cultural and political experiences all impede student access to mental health care. “That [stigma] couldn’t be farther from the truth,” Dvorak said.
Back at Dunster House, identity matters, too. “My experience is not isolated from my identity as a Black woman on this campus. The expectations are very different,” Williams said. “One person who has been so instrumental for me is one of my pre-med tutors. She is a Black woman, and being able to talk to her … [with] that connection, I don’t feel as alone.”
Questioning The Role and Responsibility of the Houses
As co-chair of the Office of the Provost’s task force on mental health, sociology professor Mario Small was struck by one initial finding: “There’s a lot of heterogeneity across the University,” he told the HPR. “We have some units doing things that work for their unit, and that’s wonderful for students there, but we still don’t know what to do for students everywhere.”
At Harvard College, heterogeneity is significant among the Houses, where students congregate not only to sleep, but also to eat, study, and socialize. “With mental health, we saw last semester the ripple effects of the Winthrop situation across the House and broader community,” said Sanika Mahajan ’21, referring to months of student protest against Ronald Sullivan’s leadership as Winthrop House faculty dean. Mahajan is chair of the Undergraduate Council’s Committee on Health, Safety, and Wellness. “We can’t ignore that the different Houses provide students with vastly different support systems.”
Why do these differences exist? According to Dean of Students Katherine O’Dair, the onus is on the faculty deans. “Within the Houses, the faculty deans set the tone and priorities for the year within the House,” she said in an interview with the HPR. “Each House has the autonomy to focus on specific issues within their community.” This structure is unlike the first-year residential communities — 17 dorms divided into four Yards that are each directed by a resident dean within the First-Year Experience Office. The FYE falls within the purview of the Dean of Students Office; House faculty deans do not. Instead, current centralized issues for the House include risk management protocols, protocols for health and safety response, and annual training for tutors and specialty roles, according to O’Dair.
This administrative structure does not reflect the recognition that faculty leadership beyond the classroom requires an understanding of student life beyond academics. “The deans are in a uniquely positioned place where they encounter daily the experiences of their students, and also understand that the academic culture is set by faculty,” said Mahajan. “That’s a very important reason for us to be thinking critically about faculty and who is hired at the House, including the role of non-resident or resident tutors in that system.”
Led by the faculty deans, other House roles which directly affect mental health also retain a relatively high degree of autonomy. As Nina Bryce from Mather House said, her role — wellness tutor — “is really about what that individual is knowledgeable about and interested in … Super-scripted roles would be very limiting, but it’s also limiting when some people have just one angle of wellness, and don’t take a more holistic stance.” Bryce proposed increased quality control, which she said would balance existing creativity with more standardization across the Houses.
Mather House: A Case Study
“At the end of our first year [as faculty deans], we wanted to ask what we can do to make the House a home,” said L. Mahadevan, sitting next to Amala Mahadevan on the floor of their Mather residence during an interview with the HPR. “Two obvious things were to first try improving our inner lives, and second, our outer lives.”
With a goal in place, the Mahadevans sought data about their community’s current state of well-being. “CAMHS had done a survey just prior,” said Amala Mahadevan, “but we felt it didn’t address a lot of the things we were looking for. A House survey would allow us to create actionable items within the House.”
The next step: mobilizing a team that included over a dozen student leaders, Mather House Resident Dean Luke Leafgren, administrators, tutors, CAMHS clinicians for consultations, and resident scholar Anas El Turabi, whose academic background helped establish “very good survey principles,” according to Amala Mahadevan. After significant outreach to build participation, the anonymous 2018 survey received a 72 percent response rate. Among other results, 63 percent of those students reported that emotional well-being negatively impacted their ability to enjoy college life, and 85.5 percent said they do not get enough sleep. The Mahadevans believed this called for urgent change.
Part of Mather’s response was an annual Mental Health and Well-being Week, first conducted over five days in 2018, then expanded to seven this past October. Daily themes included “Eat,” “Sleep,” “Move,” and “Connect,” while 15 total events ranged from Dogs of Mather office hours to gratitude letter writing to a “Be-In,” which offered “a chance to be yourself, be seen, be heard, and be real,” according to the Mahadevans’ October 13 email. Daily update emails included, often, a personal anecdote from Leafgren. “Dance like no one’s watching!” Leafgren wrote on “Create,” Day 6. “It makes me sad the number of times I didn’t dance because I didn’t know the moves to do it ‘right’! If that’s something you can relate to, give me a fist bump sometime.”
Levity aside, Bryce cautioned against misunderstanding what wellness means to Mather. “Wellness is very trendy right now, but in a way that’s kind of cheapened or commodified,” she said, “like this image of a white lady in yoga pants with a kale smoothie. That’s a really damaging kind of archetype, because I think every human being has the birthright to access deep well-being and connect with their bodies, hearts, and minds in more substantive ways.”
Beyond that week, Mather is currently the only House to bring a CAMHS clinician onsite weekly for no-appointment “Let’s Talk” meetings with students. The survey found that sophomores struggle with mental health more than juniors or seniors, so House leaders increased annual sophomore and incoming sophomore programming. In the Mather lobby, alongside profiles of well-known figures who have faced challenges, a large green poster offers student responses to the question, “How do you take care of your mental health?” Tutors also pointed to hiring processes in which mental health is explicitly valued and check-in practices which proactively prioritize each student’s well-being. As of now, students like student mental health liaison Yashaar Hafizka ’20 call Mather “a real role model among all the Houses,” and Bryce hopes to further institutionalize events like the Be-In beyond Mather too. “When I say institutionalized, I mean formalize and embed in ways that aren’t just relying on individual thoughtful, caring people to make care happen,” she explained. The Mahadevans plan to measure their impact in a few years with a second House-wide survey.
On the 2018 survey, 78 percent of students “somewhat agreed” or “strongly agreed” that Mather was a supportive environment for students’ mental health and wellbeing. “Mather may be a tired house, but it’s a happy house,” said L. Mahadevan. Though still imperfect, Mather provides other Houses with a template to follow, as well as inspiration to ideate further solutions themselves.
Now a senior, Williams told the HPR that things have changed since her sophomore year. “I feel like I’m in such a great space,” she said. “I’m so happy that I can look back on my experiences and be like, yes, I feel like I have the tools that I need in order to navigate systems that would have made me crumble two years ago. It’s taken a lot of conversations with trusted people in my life who were pushing me to prioritize myself. It definitely came with community support.”
The House is a golden opportunity for the “community support” that Williams describes. Without diminishing the responsibility of central administration or undermining the pursuit of other solutions, mental health care needs to meet students where they are — which, for Harvard College students, is where they live. If student mental health remains a widespread concern, House communities significantly impact that health, and faculty deans lead those communities, then among the many stakeholders who must address this crisis on campus, we should look to our faculty deans to take the lead within each House.
Image Credit: Trina Lilja
