Thirty years ago, when I taught at an Eastern women’s college, a student came to my office and asked me to flunk her.
She sat across from my desk, bleary eyed and exhausted, obviously in great emotional pain. She wanted an F on the recent exam, she said, because she thought she might just possibly have glanced briefly at someone else’s paper, and that brief glance might possibly have influenced her grade, and so would I please flunk her so that she could stop feeling like a cheater. The guilt was tearing her up inside. She said she thought about it constantly, and everywhere she went, in the dining hall, in the library, walking around on campus, she imagined hearing people talking about the exam.
She knew it sounded crazy, but could I possibly understand what she was going through?
Oh, I understood, all right. In fact, I felt a shock of recognition, like I was staring at myself when I was her age. And I knew what she was thinking: that if I would just put an F on that exam, she could sleep at night, she could get some relief from her all-consuming guilt. But I knew, from years of painful experience, that it wasn’t so simple. Even if I did flunk her (which I wouldn’t), her relief would last only a day or so.
I called the college counseling office and asked them to give her an appointment immediately.
Besides the counseling office, I’m not sure who I told about this episode — certainly my wife, who was also a colleague, and probably some other members of the department. Today I would hesitate to do that, of course. Privacy laws have locked down personal information to the point that I may not, for example, warn my colleague sitting in the next office that I am charging her academic advisee with plagiarism.
But what control should we exercise over our own privacy? What might we appropriately reveal to students and colleagues about our own problems?
Throughout my life, like that desperate young woman, I’ve suffered bouts of overpowering anxiety and guilt that seemed to have no basis in reality. (At age 5, I was accidentally smacked in the forehead with a baseball bat, which broke my nose, and, my mother claimed, turned a happy, contented child into a cathedral of obsessions and compulsions.)
My demon has revisited me several times over the past 40 years, and I felt its sharp talons at the very moment I was talking to that poor girl. Indeed, I told her so. I hoped it might help her to know that I understood some inkling of her pain.
Should we let our students know that some of us seemingly normal, in-control professors also suffer mental-health problems? Or is that, as the saying goes, too much information? I’m not entirely sure. But, rightly or wrongly, I decided long ago that I would not hide my illness from my students.
In my economics classes, we sometimes discuss the pharmaceutical industry, and I tell my students that I took Prozac for 20 years and am utterly convinced that it saved my life. A few months ago, when Prozac stopped working and I had to switch drugs, I explained to my students what was happening to me. I told them why I was so spacey and disorganized.
That may sound like a cheap bid to garner student sympathy. But in my experience, using poor health to explain lapses in pedagogy rarely sits well with students. Generally, they have low tolerance for anything that might inconvenience them or, worse, threaten their grades. My wife once invoked her chronic-fatigue syndrome to explain some glitches in a senior seminar, only to have a student complain to the dean about her using it as an excuse for poor performance.
The point is, I see little personal benefit in revealing to my classes that I suffer bouts of mental illness. It probably just fires up the chatter about me on Yik Yak. So why do it?
Thoreau said that “most men live lives of quiet desperation”; surely almost everyone experiences despair at some point in life. And that, we know, is the state that some of our students are in. Though we don’t always see it face to face, as when that tortured young woman asked me to fail her, the evidence is all around us. A good student suddenly starts failing exams or disappears from class. Students withdraw from school in the middle of a semester. And in a few tragic cases, students take their own lives.
I hypothesize (since I have no proof) that speaking openly about my illness will inspire some students to seek help for theirs. Quiet desperation is isolating and lonely, often accompanied by overpowering shame. Because students tend to see professors as successful people who have “made it” in life, it might help them to know that we, too, can have psychological problems.
Those monsters can be held at bay if you get help — not utterly banished, perhaps, but managed enough so that you can live your life. Sometimes the demons even help make you a better person. If disclosing my own illness can help a single student understand that, then it will have been worth any embarrassment I might feel. Yes, privacy must be protected. But my privacy is my own, and if I so choose, I can make a gift of it to my students.
I don’t know what happened to the student who came to see me all those years ago. On my own instincts, and the advice of the college counseling center, I refused to fail her. She then went to our dean of studies, hoping he would compel me to fail her. He didn’t. I ran into her the following semester, and she said she had gotten some counseling and was feeling a bit better. In those days, SSRIs were just coming on the market and not in common use. I hope it didn’t take her too long to get some relief.
Students like her need to understand that relief is available, and they should not be ashamed to seek it out. Some professors take medication, so why shouldn’t they? In revealing ourselves, we can offer hope to our students.
