“How can Yale profess to care about our mental health when it continues to allow the SIC to burden its student body, particularly its BIPOC and working class students?”

Since classes were moved online, I’ve continued holding biweekly sessions with the therapist I was seeing at the start of the semester. This experience has made me question what mental health therapy at Yale should truly entail. During this time, I went through some of the worst depression and anxiety I’ve ever faced, precipitated by the intersection of a global health crisis, financial insecurity, and a reckoning with systemic racial injustice and my own complicity. But does the care I receive address these underlying issues? True healing requires getting at the roots of mental health afflictions at Yale. How can Yale profess to care about our mental health when it continues to allow the SIC to burden its student body, particularly its BIPOC and working class students? If Yale wants to truly care for its students, it must eliminate the SIC, an unjust policy that exacerbates mental health issues and often precludes students from seeking out the care they need.

Zach Stanik, he/him, MC ’21