Health: Inside the Campus Mental-Health Crisis

This article originally appeared in The Walrus. Read the full text here.

Campuses are offering more wellness programs than ever before. So why are students in crisis?

In the summer of 2012, Sope Owoaje, then fifteen, travelled from Brampton, Ontario, to her hometown of Lagos, Nigeria, to attend her cousin’s wedding. In Yoruba culture, weddings are extravagant affairs. Owoaje recalls that her father, a Lagos resident and executive at the central bank, paid for the entire event and walked the bride down the aisle.

Following a church ceremony on the third day of the festivities, Owoaje and her cousins returned to the family home for one last celebratory dinner. Her dad’s car arrived a minute later, trailed by four strange men on motorcycles. Suddenly, a motorcyclist darted in front of the vehicle, cutting it off, while the other three crowded in. Owoaje watched as one of the men pulled out a gun and shot her father through the window of the car. “The bullet missed his chest and hit his upper arm,” Owoaje says. “Everybody around me screamed. My dad had a rush of adrenaline. I saw him speed past me with his window shattered.”

He drove himself to an emergency ward, where doctors hurried him into surgery. Despite the injury, he recovered fully, and the family chalked up the violence to an attempted carjacking. But, when Owoaje returned to Brampton, she felt changed. She withdrew from social life and her grades slipped. She replayed the shooting in her head and felt unsafe everywhere she went. “I was scared to be in rooms where I couldn’t see the entrance,” she says. “I needed to keep track of how many people were present, who was coming and going, and where the doors were located.”

When she was in grade twelve, her mother took a new job and moved the family to Iqaluit. The wide streetscapes of her new hometown gave Owoaje a sense of restfulness, and Inuit culture, with its storytelling traditions and reverence for Elders, reminded her of her Yoruba upbringing. She often visited the Elders’ Qammaq, a community centre where seniors gathered to talk. An Inuk woman in her nineties told Owoaje about how the residential school system had broken her family, and other people described being taken by ship to tuberculosis asylums where their friends died and were buried in unmarked graves. Owoaje began to understand trauma—how it stays with you and manifests in unpredictable ways.

In Iqaluit, she began to heal, but when, in the fall of 2014, she moved to Winnipeg to study life sciences at the University of Manitoba, her anxiety returned. During orientation week, she had a fever that consigned her to her thirteenth-floor dorm room. When she emerged, it appeared that everybody except her had made new friends. “I was more lonely than I’d ever been in my life,” she says. For lectures, she’d show up early to pick an optimal seat—sufficiently close to the exits to enable a speedy escape but far enough away that she wouldn’t be in the line of fire if a shooter came in. “If I got to class and saw that somebody had taken my spot,” Owoaje says, “I would go back to my dorm room furious with myself.” She had expected university to be exhilarating, but instead, she felt terrified and unexcited to learn.

She wanted professional help but couldn’t find an online link to student mental health services. She called the campus medical clinic instead and, after three weeks, received an appointment. “I told the doctor, ‘I need mental health counselling,’” Owoaje recalls. “And he said, ‘Sorry, we only deal with physical issues here.’” Clearly, she’d gone to the wrong place, but he didn’t mention where the right place might be. (In an email to The Walrus, a spokesperson for the University of Manitoba wrote that the school offers “an integrated continuum of care, and a ‘no wrong door’ philosophy to ensure students are directed to the services they need.” The spokesperson did not comment on the specifics of Owoaje’s experience.)

Owoaje felt rebuffed, as if the university were chastising her for failing to keep herself together. What she didn’t tell the physician was that even getting to the clinic had been an ordeal. “It was at the end of a long, dark corridor,” she remembers. “I knew that, if I went far enough down that hallway, I wouldn’t be able to see the exits.”

This is an excerpt. Read the full text here.