15% of Harvard undergraduates have been diagnosed with a mental health issue, according to a 2018 HUHS survey cited in the July 2020 Report of the Task Force on Managing Student Mental Health. 11% were in treatment, and 46% (including over half of all women) had “concerns” about potential undiagnosed issues that they may have been experiencing.
Students struggling with their mental health have a number of support options. Many of these options run by peers or academic support personnel instead of licensed therapists, and hence cannot make certain recommendations. In some peer support groups this is expressly forbidden: Indigo Peer Counseling and Harvard Eating Concerns Hotline and Outreach (ECHO) are “non-directive” to the point that a student describing symptoms and asking if they matched with a particular mental disorder would not receive a yes or no answer. Such groups, along with the Academic Resource Center (ARC) and similar organizations, exist to support students, not to diagnose them, and are very aware of the risks of practicing psychology without proper education. Those who need more significant help, therefore, often have few places to turn but Counseling and Mental Health Services (CAMHS).
This adds up to a high demand for mental health services, which strains CAMHS. According to the 2020 report, they increased their professional staff by around 40% since 2015, to a total of 47 clinicians. This has required careful planning. In 2018, after Cambridge police roughly arrested a Black Harvard student and the student advocate groups that arose in response called for greater efforts to hire Black and Brown mental health workers, Chief of CAMHS Barbara Lewis said that such efforts would simply not be within budget. Even the new 24/7 CAMHS Cares telephone helpline, which one might expect to be a cost-cutting measure, was in fact funded by a donation from the parent of a College student.
The result is an organization which has developed a reputation, among students, for moving slowly. One junior told the Independent that “my friends aren’t even wanting to go anymore because it [the wait] is so long and they have had to look for outside help.” (To avoid publicizing who is and isn’t in treatment for mental health conditions, students’ names were omitted from this piece.) She also noted that her clinician was leaving CAMHS, which led her to believe that she would have to “start this process all over again.”
“My friends aren’t even wanting to go anymore because it [the wait] is so long and they have had to look for outside help.”
Another student, who waited 1-2 weeks for their first appointment, pointed out that “I got an appointment really early because I had signed up for it in the beginning of August before school started. I know people who didn’t and have to wait a much longer time.” The Independent’s survey on CAMHS wait time satisfaction garnered few responses, but all of them were negative.
This is not to say that CAMHS is impenetrable. In 2019, according to the task force report, the wait time for an initial phone consultation was under a week. However, these calls last only about twenty minutes, and it often takes much longer than a week to get a full appointment. In general, CAMHS seems to excel at helping students who are already mostly doing fine and just need a little extra support: they have a full calendar of workshops every academic year, and their urgent care appointments, advertised as a space for “reducing immediate distress and increasing problem-solving” and specifically “not ‘drop-in appointments’ nor… therapy appointments,” can be requested for the same day.
It would be easy, at this point, to dismiss CAMHS as too little too late, an insult to the students who need serious help. A more fair assessment would be that they simply do not have the resources to do everything they want to. Historically, they have not been shy about pushing for more: when HUHS closed its overnight care beds in 2015, the money saved was put towards CAMHS expansion. Students can only hope that some of this year’s $283 million budget surplus will go to them. Until then, they will just have to wait.
Lewis did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
Michael Kielstra ’22 (pmkielstra@college.harvard.edu) would like to point out that all you need to live safely in the COVID era is CAMHS: Cleaning And Masking; Hand Sanitizer.
Photo by Rivers Sheehan ’23