Mental Health
UChicago overworks us, burns us out, and prevents us from building community. Productivity culture – the idea that you should be constantly working at the expense of your mental and physical well-being – and the romanticization of “academic rigor” normalize depression and chronic stress. Despite this, you need and deserve rest. You need and deserve support and community. Your mental health deserves to be taken seriously. True mental health justice requires other forms of liberation, because structures like racism and capitalism force us to constantly endure unhealthy stress and violence, but there are people building spaces and resources to provide real mental health support.
Navigating mental healthcare at UChicago
Student Wellness offers a variety of mental health services, such as therapy and referrals, connection to another therapy service called Timely Care, psychiatric services, a 24/7 therapist on call, and more. Active Minds, a mental health RSO on campus, has curated and regularly updates a directory of mental health resources, which includes step by step explanations of how each one of Student Wellness’ services works and how to access them: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1G8FkU3Sss1zs69KG_TUF5T3dLveyr607rOze87vofV4/edit#heading=h.1wrm9lq9ox12
However, there are a variety of problems with Student Wellness and valid reasons why you may not want to engage with them – issues with long waiting periods (which Timely Care has been brought in to attempt to resolve), and misdiagnosis, gaslighting, discrimination (especially for women, LGBTQ+ students, and BIPOC students) have been experienced by many students seeking care. Active Minds’ directory also has a long list of off-campus mental health resources, including those that do not work with police and those that center various marginalized communities or specific experiences (Black, AAPI, Latinx, Indigenous, LGBTQ+, sexual assault survivors, disabled people, grief, etc). You can also reach out directly to Active Minds by DMing them on Instagram or emailing them at activemindsuchi@gmail.com for help finding or navigating a mental health resource.
Police and "care"
True mental health care recognizes and empowers autonomy and community-based healing. Mental health care systems often give medical professionals or police the power to discredit and/or overrule people's autonomy, and create conditions for violence and trauma to be perpetuated against people with mental health symptoms.
Calls to crisis lines, including Student Wellness' 24/7 therapist on call, do not always but can sometimes lead to intervention or detainment of the caller by the police/UCPD.
UCPD intervention can lead to involuntary hospitalization, which can be a dehumanizing and traumatic experience that creates a financial burden, often amounting to thousands of dollars in total cost. For students, involuntary hospitalization is often accompanied by forced leave of absence from the university.
UCPD's role as a responder to mental health crises can also be dangerous, especially to people of color. In 2018, student Soji Thomas was shot by UCPD officer Nicholas Twardak (who is still working for UCPD) while experiencing a severe mental health crisis. UCPD also responds to mental crisis calls made on community members, sometimes with CPD, and has the ability to involuntarily hospitalize community members as well.
In general, police often escalate situations, causing someone in distress to become more distressed, and putting people at risk of violence or involuntary hospitalization at the officer's discretion. Police interactions can be traumatizing even without these outcomes, causing additional emotional harm a person will then need to navigate.
Mental health care doesn't have to be this way! We can build communities of care who can de-escalate in moments of crisis. We can learn from others who have survived, and know that we are not alone. It is important, however, to be conscious about the way that institutions function and how to navigate them.
Alternatives
Build conversations about mental health and community care into your relationships! Learning with your community about how you can support each other before a crisis occurs makes everyone feel more equipped to navigate crises without falling back on police. People experiencing mental health crises benefit far more from the care of people they are comfortable with, who know them, than the escalation and loss of autonomy that comes with mental health systems.
Of UChicago-based groups, Active Mind has a mental health resource directory for alternative forms of care, and provides many different mental wellness spaces throughout the year. Care Not Cops also organizes around community care and will be offering an abolitionist mental health training this year and a Creative Interventions skills group. Phoenix Survivor's Alliance organizes to support survivors of sexual violence - they also have a resource directory focused on this topic.
There are several off-campus spaces for care and crisis support that do not work with the carceral system, some of which are highlighted below.
The Living Room on the north side is a peer respite center, an alternative to psychiatric hospitalization
Project LETS and Fireweed Collective center the experience of mad and disabled multiply marginalized people with resources and sometimes online support groups
Trans Lifeline is a 24/7 crisis line for trans and non-binary people that does not work with the police and has a great resource bank of other resources that avoid the police and carceral system: https://translifeline.org/resour
