by Anonymous
Note: This article has not been updated since 2021.
The University of Pennsylvania trains us to best sell ourselves on the labor market. Whether we aspire to be elite workers in the industry of our choosing or CEOs, most students spend these four years accumulating accomplishments in hopes of increasing their hireability after graduation. This drive fosters the anxiety-inducing, dehumanizing question: what am I worth?
The culture of capitalism embodied by Penn’s hypercompetitive environment convinces students that their personal value is tied to their productivity, leading to a snowball of self-doubt. Why am I not good enough? What is wrong with me? Why can’t I keep up? These taxing doubts create a constant stress, anxiety, and exhaustion that in some ways are unique to rigorous universities, Penn in particular, but are also endemic in capitalist society because of the numbing alienation of selling labor in exchange for survival.
Often, Penn’s highly competitive environment is both lauded and criticized for being “pre-professional.” The term itself reveals the connection between the university and the labor market that makes universities a hotbed for burnout and anxiety. As a university student you are not yet a professional worker, but rather a pre-professional buying a degree to be able to sell your labor in the future at a higher price. The steep price of a university education and the heavy indoctrination to “succeed” reinforce the idea that becoming a maximally efficient and desirable worker is a privilege, a marker of prestige, rather than a demand of the labor market that runs people ragged.
When we examine Penn’s mental health policies, then, we should also consider how the conditions and culture of work under capitalism aggravate the collective mental health crisis the University has failed to adequately address. As the scholar Mark Fisher phrased it:
It is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill?
This article is not to say that capitalism causes mental illness and that its abolition would mean an inherently mentally healthy world. To claim that mental illness and disability would disappear under a socialist or communist political economy is itself an ableist and eugenicist position that seeks to erase the existence of mentally ill and disabled folks rather than truly make the world more accessible for them. Rather, the capitalist system and its cultures of productivity and individualism worsen already-existing mental illness; can introduce or trigger mental health issues, especially those related to constant stress, exhaustion, financial insecurity, racism, and the fight for survival; and prohibit the implementation of a healthcare system equipped to address the mental health crisis.
Moreover, the capitalist culture of individualism makes it harder to address mental health and wellness collectively. In the Penn context, for example, many students use the term “Penn Face” for the widespread practice of students hiding their constant anxiety, depression, fear of failure, and exhaustion behind a veneer of happiness and carefree success. This invisibilization of Penn’s extreme labor demands and the effects of those demands (no sleep, breakdowns, poor eating habits) prohibit solidarity among students. When students invisibilize their mental sacrifice for high grades and packed resumes, it makes it harder for other students to see their exhaustion as a collective complaint rather than a personal failure. Openness is essential for solidarity in the same way that workers discussing wages or neighbors discussing rents can help to assess the structures that hurt them.
On the other hand, some students rationalize these sacrifices to cope or to brag. Instead of hiding their sacrifices, they constantly talk about their exhaustion as a badge of pride, thereby transforming disturbing self-neglect into a reflection of their work ethic. We must ask ourselves, however, why we put this martyrdom on a pedestal. Capitalist culture valorizes inspiring stories of people overcoming great adversity to work hard. It can only look at the individual and judge their actions; it is unable to provide solid critique of adversity itself.
A culture unable to critique adversity surely cannot begin to mitigate and dismantle it. Penn has demonstrated time and again that it is not ready to truly address the mental health crisis among its students, at least not in a way that serves the students’ interests above its own. It is no secret that CAPS is underfunded, and unpopular among students. Despite an influx of funding after the string of suicides that hit the University in the 2010s, students still comment on the inaccessibility and inadequacy of care at CAPS and the pressure to seek care elsewhere due to limited capacity. Even during the pandemic—when Penn remained online and students off campus—CAPS turned away students seeking appointments explicitly because they lived across state lines, even though other students outside of Pennsylvania continued to receive care.
While external mental health services may better serve some students’ needs, they are certainly more expensive and therefore inaccessible to many students. The lack of long-term therapy at Penn leaves behind students with extended mental health problems and means care at CAPS is more of a band-aid for crises than treatment and prevention of mental illness. Of course crisis services are crucial, and it is no fault of CAPS counselors that long-term services are not offered. However, even in crisis situations Penn fails its students. When a student calls the CAPS hotline and reports (or is reported as) being a potential harm to themselves or others, they will be greeted by Penn police and escorted to the hospital by force, without the clear possibility of leaving voluntarily and with no consideration for the cost of hospitalization. Not only can this experience be traumatizing, but it also directly puts BIPOC students experiencing crisis in unnecessary and dangerous contact with the police.
Penn’s general attitude toward mental health on campus seems to be to provide stopgap measures for crises on campus and to minimize its own risk and liability. The best illustration of this attitude is the University’s policies toward leaves of absence, particularly involuntary leaves. A 2018 report by the Ruderman Family Foundation on the mental health policies of Ivy League universities gave Penn a D+ grade, which, while the highest of the League, is abysmal. Part of the justification for the low grade were Penn’s policies toward leaves of absence, including:
- its imposition of minimum lengths for student leaves of absence,
- the inclusion of community disruption as grounds for involuntary leave, and
- the lack of clear communication of students’ entitlement to accommodation.
The report notes that including community disruption as grounds for involuntary leave is “broad and vague such that it can improperly be used to punish students who engage in help-seeking behaviors.” Additionally, it emphasizes that “discrimination based on conduct caused by disability is the same thing as discrimination based on disability, and is illegal” (added emphasis). Penn must provide accommodations for mentally ill and disabled students before considering an involuntary leave of absence, and yet its own (ableist and discriminatory) policies shirk this legal responsibility.
Many students also report that Penn has aggressively pressured them into taking leaves of absence and prevented them from returning once they were ready. University policies toward leave—which are vague, confusing, punitive, and rigid—often act against the best interests of students’ mental health, including its prohibition of student participation in Penn clubs, which can be a vital source of social connection for students. Overall, Penn increasingly treats its mentally ill students as a liability and its policies as risk aversion, perhaps to avoid future litigation and an honest suicide rate; once again, Penn chooses its coffers and reputation over the needs and wellbeing of its students.
Not only does the capitalist culture on campus impede solidarity and mutual care among struggling students, but so does the University’s mental health infrastructure. It is essential to combat “Penn Face” and exhaustion-bragging, but it is not enough to merely acknowledge the collective mental health crisis, nor is it enough to fight for more University response. We must do both, and also go further: we must advocate for ourselves, take care of each other, dismantle the capitalist system that harms rather than heals, and work to create a version of the world that prioritizes wellness and accessibility over productivity and profit. Penn’s response will never be enough because it will always be reactionary and self-serving. We cannot rely on “Days of Play” and baby goats to mitigate our mental health problems, and we cannot let the University pat itself on the back each time it offers superficial “solutions” to deeply-rooted problems. We deserve more.
Finally, in approaching questions of mental health and the capitalist system, we should also take a deeper look at self-care. In a similar vein of thinking about the root issue at hand, self-care should be the foundation for joy, not the salve for pain. This can take the form of community care, support networks of friends, and regular rest. “Self-care” has become a commercialized excuse for companies to promote their products. Of course it’s okay to indulge in yourself by using face masks and impulse-buying teas! But the hard work of real self-care, as opposed to this neoliberal care, must involve rejecting the culture of capitalism that encourages us to prioritize productivity over rest, and suffering alone over community care and solidarity. It must involve separating our self-worth from our labor the best we can, and advocating for a world where our entire lives don’t depend on the marketability of our labor.
Important Note:
While Penn’s response has been insufficient and CAPS has its flaws, this article is not meant to discourage students from seeking help and resources from Penn and CAPS. Most of the time, imperfect resources are better than none at all. Please go to CAPS if you need affordable professional support; take a leave of absence if you feel that’s what is best for you. You can go in with caution, knowing that CAPS can be hit-or-miss and that Penn’s leave policies as-is are rigid.
If you are not receiving the care you need, you can ask for a different counselor until you find one who meets your needs. If your counselor is pushing you to seek external care and this is not in your best interest or is not possible, ask to continue with them, and keep asking—there is no official cap on sessions. It can be exhausting to constantly have to advocate for ourselves and our needs, and we should not have to do this. But we all have the right to the care and accommodations we need.
Penn Disorientation Guide 