If you sit down with Jim Clack, Duke's director of Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS), he'll give you two anecdotes. The first one is that the best way to improve funding for a counseling budget is for a crazy guy with a knife to threaten the University President and then for the director to talk him down. Fortunately for Duke, we don't need a crazy person to improve mental health, but we do need a PR campaign.
Next, Jim will ask you what a Duke graduate with a 4.0 and perfect MCATs calls someone with an A+ in mental health: boss. Though not a revolutionary concept, there is clear evidence that emotionally healthy individuals excel more so than their talented, but anxious or depressed peers.
The benefits of mental health also translate into the classroom. Those who can cope with stress, foster honest and meaningful relationships with their peers and find joy in their daily activities consistently achieve superior academic results.
This issue transcends individual growth and aspirations. Take, for example, your closest group of friends. Who do you rely upon? Who supports you when you need help? Chances are, this balanced and empathetic person dramatically improves your life at Duke. We, as a community, value having peers who are mentally healthy.
Even with the relatively obvious points we've just made, students still attach a stigma to CAPS. First, students inaccurately perceive functional problems with the system. One hears claims of three-week long waiting lists, that CAPS is just a place for already medicated students to get their prescriptions renewed and that visits could adversely affect one's future job prospects by appearing on a permanent record.
A conversation with anyone who's been to CAPS or a visit with Dr. Clack immediately dismisses these perceived problems. The perception of a long waiting list at CAPS demonstrates the lack of desire Duke students have to understand fully the options available to them. Every week, CAPS sets aside 37 appointment times exclusively for new intakes. There is a staff member on call at all times in case of emergency. If you absolutely need to talk to a counselor, there will never be a waiting list. Also, the fact that only 27 percent of students treated by CAPS are medicated refutes the common criticism concerning CAPS's role. Finally, medical records are absolutely confidential. Your being treated by CAPS will in no way prohibit you from studying anatomy at Harvard Medical Center or crunching numbers at Goldman Sachs.
The more detrimental stigma, however, relates to the year's most exhausted issue: effortless perfection. As eloquently expounded by student health education specialist, Ray Rodriguez, when somebody walks out of Page with an armful of Career Center pamphlets, you know they've been to CAPS. The idea that no one can help me but myself, coupled with the rampant competition at Duke, ingrains in students the conception that those who seek help are in some way inferior. This premise, of course, is ludicrous. The kids with the 4.0s are stressing in the library. The people with the perfect bodies are sweating away in Wilson. But the kids with the big smiles and job offers probably have stopped by CAPS.
CAPS is exceptionally well-funded and staffed and is housed in an accessible facility. We have one of the best student-to-counselor ratios in the country, and exit surveys show statistically significant improvement in those who receive treatment.
So Dick, can you convince students that it takes effort to be perfect? Rumor has it, in your tenure at Yale, you were known to unexpectedly pop by students' rooms and challenge them to a game of Mario Kart (or when you started at Yale, checkers). If you perpetuate this tradition at Duke, which we hope you do, will it be enough?
We don't think so. You need scream this from the rooftops. In your address to each incoming class, in your addresses to the faculty,and even in your discussions with prospective students, you must prioritize mental health. Even then, Duke students will remain entrenched in their isolationism, feeling as though their problems are uniquely their own, having no sense of communal support. You must wholeheartedly commit yourself to creating a culture where students genuinely care about the response to the question, "How're you doing?"
Or maybe, just maybe, you could borrow a technique from the CAPS director's book. Run into a student's room, threaten them with a knife and have CAPS there waiting to talk you down. Even in a stable and healthy Duke community, a little craziness can help to get your message across.
Anthony Vitarelli and Chase Johnson are Trinity juniors.
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