I find it difficult to watch my newsfeed fill with cheery posts about the need to talk more, especially when these are written by people who have answered my own struggles with silence. I have spent years, cushioned by my privilege, talking about mental illness. And while I have been fortunate to find receptive audiences, I have also encountered many well-intentioned people who encourage or pressure me to censor my words and experiences, usually assuming I am unaware of the potential consequences of speaking about mental illness.

While I may not struggle with talking, I continue to struggle to be heard, be accepted for who I am and have my words considered on their own terms. I know that my employment prospects at Mt. A have been impacted by my openness about mental illness. Well-meaning professors have at various times explained they were doing “exposure therapy” with me, made decisions on my behalf to “protect me from my anxiety,” or told me to write about personal experiences of mental illness. I have learned that speaking in an environment like Mt. A, in which stigma, ableism and sanism remain pervasive, is accompanied by risks and that choosing to talk is not the same as being told to.

I am tired of committing myself to mental health work on a campus where people are unable to separate my value and potential from my mental illness. I am tired of questioning how different my last five years might have looked if I’d tried harder to hide this side of me, or if this side simply didn’t exist at all. I am tired of talking without seeing change.

So, to everyone who shared about Bell Let’s Talk last Wednesday, I’d like to present you with the following challenges:

Students: Work to get comfortable asking people about their well-being when you are genuinely concerned about them, sitting through messy disclosures and not knowing how to support your friends. This is not easy, but listening takes many forms. It might look like offering to walk a friend to the Wellness Centre, letting them sleep over, or being honest about your uncertainty and asking how you can help.

Professors: Go beyond the accommodation statements included in your syllabuses. Learn about Universal Design in Learning and experiment with implementing it. Attend workshops offered by the Meighen Centre. Attend Elephant in the Room. Advocate for students and employees with mental illnesses at Mt. A. Ask your students to comment on accessibility in their course evaluations. Challenge long-held ableist assumptions embedded in typical evaluation styles, classroom setups and ideas like “academic integrity.”

Administrators: Commit not only to mental wellness, but also to mental illness. Continue to apply for funding for more professional services. Invite public feedback on policies like the new Mental Health Strategy and Students of Concern Protocol. Learn more about community members’ experiences at Mt. A. Ask about experiences of racism, sexism, classism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia and sexual violence on campus and then work to combat these. Most of all, do not allow yourselves to write and think mental illness into abstraction. It is a reality many of us live every day.

We must all work harder at being vulnerable, learning, unlearning, asking, watching, listening and yes, talking. A corporation isn’t going to do our dirty work. But frontlines are not always those drawn in protests on the streets. They exist in boardrooms, classrooms and bedrooms, in prisons and on reserves, in darkened movie theatres and public bathrooms, across continents and on sidewalks. You do not have to be at every site at once. But please remember that mental illness is not confined to social media and neither should your allyship be.

I don’t recall exactly why I decided to go to the event in my second year, but I believe it had something to do with regretting not having heard one of my closest friends speak the year prior and having begun to recognize how much the event had meant to them. Sitting in Tweedie Hall, I was overwhelmed by the degree to which others’ experiences spoke to my own. People I had never met were describing my life with such precision, it was all I could do to hold back my tears until the event concluded.

But I also worried that if others who shared my diagnoses had “gotten better” and I had not, perhaps I was somehow “doing my mental illness wrong.” I left the event feeling very emotional. As I tried to manoeuvre through the crowd to leave and find some privacy, another member of my residence – who later joined the Change Your Mind executive with me – spotted my distress and offered to walk me home. In retrospect, I realize that this too is part of the Elephant in the Room experience: finding solidarity in those who understand without explanation. I joined the Change Your Mind executive the following year and have been a part of it now for three years.

As a graduating student, I finally applied to speak at this year’s Elephant in the Room. It was a long time coming. I considered the risks briefly: diagnoses shared through event promotion would remain online long after, possibly jeopardizing job prospects. It is not the first time I have weighed these risks. As my comfort with being vulnerable online has grown, so too have the number of warnings I receive from well-intentioned friends, family members and others. But I will almost certainly always live with mental illness and am unashamed to admit it. And while risks do exist, my privilege lessens them significantly. We only strengthen stigma by staying silent. The opportunity to share my story in front of a willing audience and, in doing so, help break down stigma – the effects of which I know all too well – made the decision to speak at this point in my life an easy one.

I am accustomed to hiding my struggles with mental illness, and I pay my psychologist to listen to them. To have over one hundred students and staff come by choice on a weeknight to bear witness to my story, in its uncomfortable and messy truth, was heartwarming and transformative beyond words. Over one hundred people showed up for my fellow speakers and me, and for one another. We shared a space in which we could speak openly and candidly about the realities of living with mental illness without judgment. We listened, and we healed.

These numbers are telling. Elephant in the Room creates something essential that seems to be lacking elsewhere, both on campus and in our lives. Last Wednesday I felt seen, heard, accepted, validated and perhaps even understood. Thank you to all those who took part in that. I hope you felt the same. And to my fellow speakers, thank you for your vulnerability, and thank you for your teaching. Elephant in the Room has come to occupy a special place in my heart and I hope the event will continue for many years to come.

I am suspicious of the MoodCheck app and its accompanying promotional campaign for several reasons. I question why this app – but not others – is being so intensely promoted, what is done with the information it collects, why the focus seems to be on merely using the app rather than on the benefits of mindfulness and, most of all, why universities are competing against each other for the greatest app usage and why this competition is tied to funding for a campus mental wellness initiative.

However, I am more troubled by the neoliberal ideology underpinning the app and its promotion. Though there are many benefits to mindfulness as well as to using apps to promote mental health – benefits like reducing barriers such as geographic location, finances and the obligation of disclosure to access support – I caution against seeing apps as replacements for actual psychiatric services.

I question why the enthusiasm Mt. A has shown for initiatives like Elephant in the Room, Mental Health Champions, or the MoodCheck app is never mirrored by equal enthusiasm and advocacy for providing accessible psychiatric services here.

A similar individualized, neoliberal rhetoric, which at times borders on victim-blaming, can be found in the new student affairs Mental Health Strategy. There is a glaring absence of acknowledgement of intersectionality – save for a few mentions of indigenous students – and the language employed in the strategy is also paternalistic. Words like “resilience,” “coping,” “adapting,” “self-regulating” and “emotions-management” are featured prominently, and student needs are misleadingly labelled student “demands.” Mental illness is not contextualized, recognizing students must deal with the pressures of facing a bleak and competitive job market, rising tuition and increasing debt, and a culture of perfectionism, over-achievement and over-involvement uniquely pervasive at Mt. A. It is demeaning to read that my mental health would be improved if only I had better skills in “self-soothing.” I feel as though I am being asked to self-discipline not for my own good, but rather to prevent me from becoming another “burden” on the system.

Both the MoodCheck App and forthcoming student affairs Mental Health Strategy are informed by the idea of mental wellness. The problem is not with the concept of mental wellness itself, but rather with its replacement of conversation about mental illness. Mental wellness is imbued with ableist and sanist ideas of self-discipline and self/emotion management. By choosing the right activities and attitudes, we are told we also choose to be happy and healthy, or mentally well. This discourse erases those who are unable to be these things due to both their brain chemistry and situational experiences and interactions. Painting mental wellness as a matter of choice, determination and persistence runs the risk of calling those with mental illnesses responsible for their ill health. Though sleep, exercise, eating healthy foods and being mindful are beneficial to all, they are ultimately not replacements for actual psychiatric services, and moreover are harder to do when dealing with mental illnesses like depression.

I urge the university to replace the mental wellness discourse with serious conversations about mental illness, its structural causes and catalysts, and how it impacts our community as a whole. Let’s ask how being mindful of your mood will change the scheduling of all of your midterms during the same week. Let’s question how you can be expected to stay mentally well when you experience daily microaggressions, or worry about losing your scholarship if you take a reduced course load or a leave of absence. Let’s talk about how you need to pay for assessments to get the diagnoses necessary to receive formal accommodations. Let’s address how every time we open Mt. A’s website we are bombarded by the resumes of Bell Scholars, Rhodes Scholars and athletes, and how this makes people like me over-commit ourselves to measure up to Mt. A’s definition of success. Most of all, I want to talk about how it has felt to study here for four years without being able to access the counselling and psychiatric help I need. So no, I won’t be helping us win the MoodCheck Challenge. My mood would be infinitely improved if I were able to access the services I need.

I have always wished I could explain my perfectionism to you, but when you ask about it, I am usually standing before you, tears streaming down my face, tongue-tied by anxiety.

I want to explain my perfectionism to you because I want to dispel myths to combat what my mind tells me is your personal judgement, but what I know is a culture of silence around perfectionism in academia. Here goes my “best” attempt. (Note: It is impossible to achieve my best, as you will see. The bar gets raised higher every time I try.)

I procrastinate but I am not lazy. I care immensely. Procrastination for me goes hand-in-hand with perfectionism and anxiety. Intense anxiety. The kind of anxiety of which committing a sentence to paper feels like spitting out a shard of glass. It’s not that I think I can’t produce the assignment. I know I can write 2,000 words. I know I can do a literature review or a research proposal. Still, every assignment balloons out of proportion and perspective in my head. Soon there’s nowhere to begin and the project becomes massive and nebulous. I feel compelled to do every assignment justice, read every relevant article on every database, and find every nuance to every problem. This is perhaps why my professors often remind me I am not yet writing my thesis. But in my head, every project has become a thesis and I must prove I have thought everything out and haven’t neglected a single piece of the puzzle.

I’m not sure you realize it, but office hours are scary, even if you aren’t. For a perfectionist, being lost and uncertain is unacceptable and is equivalent to failure. There is no grey area permitted for learning. Simply getting to your office hours is even harder if I’ve procrastinated and have nothing to show for it, despite having depleted the world’s store of sticky notes and having bookmarked approximately half the Internet’s contents. I feel like I haven’t earned your time and attention unless I’ve produced tangible work. And if I have managed to write something, all I want is your reassurance—but I am simultaneously terrified of letting you see work that is incomplete. I am convinced I am an imposter, and letting you view a work in progress is the surest route to being found out.

As I stumble and careen my way from assignment to assignment, I know I usually leave a trail of ‘A’s behind in my wake. Contrary to what you may think, however, I am motivated by assignments but not by marks, and am mortified when you think I only ever reduce my learning to letter grades. I am committed to my assignments as ends in themselves, and genuinely want to learn and understand deeply.

I know it might seem like I’m obsessed with my grades, but for me they signify so much more than an A or A+; they are intricately tied up in my self-worth, background and identity. Nor am I proud of those grades. All I see in every assignment are gaping flaws. If I’ve written an assignment in one night, I don’t feel like I worked hard enough to deserve my mark, but then again, no matter how long I spend on a project, whatever I produce never begins to scratch the surface of what I was trying to think about and convey. I’m equal parts worried you’ll think I actually produced my best work (“but I can do so much better!”) or that you can tell that I didn’t give it my all. Perfectionism mires me in a never-ending cycle of disappointment and shame that resurfaces with every assignment, and with the mocking standards I imagine all around.

Keeping the “state of perfectionism” in mind, here are my tips on how to help support your classroom perfectionist:

When I feel like I can’t begin, please don’t tell me that I always produce quality work or that you’re looking forward to reading my paper. I know it’s said with the best of intentions but it makes me think that you have a particular standard for me to reach, and I’m convinced that this will be the time I fail to reach it.

Encourage us to come to you early on for help writing an outline if needed. This will help pin the project down and rid it of its ever-enlarging, frightening shapelessness that keeps us from getting started. The approach that’s worked best for me is when one of us takes notes while we chat – notes I can later turn into an outline. Conversing helps prove to me that I am not actually starting at ground zero; I always already have some background knowledge, thoughts and opinions about a subject. Explicitly telling me how many articles and sources you expect us to check in total is also helpful. I won’t stop reading articles unless I’m given a limit or have exhausted my time. On that note, proposals are frightening but useful in forcing me to have something written down, which gives me something to fall back on lest I delve back into procrastination.

Please keep in mind, though, that procrastination is an impossible deed to reverse. Flexible deadlines are acknowledgements of the messiness of life and mental illness, and they result in greatly reduced stress and guilt. It takes courage to ask for these kinds of accommodations – to know and advocate for oneself – and the student who brings these concerns forth generally wants to do their best.

Explicitly remind your class that it is okay to come see you before they’ve completed their work. You want to see us most of all when we are struggling, which includes struggling to get started. Leaving your door ajar if you are available or having your office hours posted on your door can also be very helpful for the panicked student who wants to come to you but feels like they can visit you only during office hours.

I’ve shown perfectionist tendencies since I was four. I also live in a time of neoliberalism, which rewards me for working myself to the bone—but the two are not causally linked. I don’t choose my perfectionism (encouraged by neoliberalism), and can do only my best to be proactive about it. Perfectionism is a legitimate form of mental illness.

My relationship to perfectionism is perverse: I need it to accrue achievements which make me feel special and worthwhile (at least temporarily), but I am simultaneously unable to internalize them and ashamed of my dependency on external assessments. To this end, even if you can see the hurt it causes, you cannot cure my perfectionism. Docking grades for overdoing projects or maintaining rigid deadlines will make me worry more about word counts and your expectations, but they will not change my thinking and writing process. The best you can do is help by putting things into perspective. Perfectionism spurs – and is spurred by – anxiety. I might seem rational, but when I’m anxious, my mind is out on a 10-mile sprint with no end in sight, or else is being dragged along like a puppet behind a car on a freeway, leaving me breathless and reeling. Anxiety obscurs my thinking and keeps me from holding onto any one thought long enough for it to register. Taking the time to spell things out for me, putting a situation into perspective when I cannot do the same for myself, is greatly appreciated.

I see perfectionism as a curse disguised as a blessing, but with your understanding and support, in conjunction with my own mental health work, you can help me keep my brain in check. Your willingness to listen, comfort and reassure will help remove barriers to my learning. And at the end of the day, all I want to do is to learn.