The challenge of coping with a mental illness while in university is one of the issues I’m most concerned about, since it’s something I spent eight years doing, sometimes well, other times not well at all. Since I don’t want to write a half-assed post about such an important subject, I’m not going to do any thinking tonight and instead provide you with a few links:

Susan posts about The College Mental Health Crisis and luckymud mentions an interesting tidbit re: same.

Syd and Nurse Ratched worry that the Virginia Tech shootings will, in Nurse Ratched’s words, “feed into the belief that everyone with a mental illness is a danger to society. This belief is the farthest thing from the truth, but unfortunately, many people suffering from mental illnesses are going to suffer as a consequence of yesterday’s tragic events.” I would be very surprised if she and Syd were wrong.

Note to self: on the subject of protecting students vs. civil liberties, I must remember to blog someday about How I Almost Got Kicked out of My University Residence for Cutting Myself. It’s a much less interesting story than you’d think, barely a story at all, so don’t get excited.

But I’m still bitter about it.

As for basic information on coping with mental illness throughout your post-secondary education, especially in Canada, there is Your Education - Your Future, a guide to college and university for students with psychiatric disabilities from the Canadian Mental Health Association. It was created in 2004 and isn’t entirely up-to-date, though — for instance, I noticed that the information about grants for students with disabilities is out of date. Try this page for correct information about the Canada Study Grant for the Accommodation of Students with Permanent Disabilities and the Canada Access Grant for Students with Permanent Disabilities. Yes, people with bipolar disorder are eligible for the second one even if they don’t have any learning disabilities or stuff like that. And it can really come in handy when you’re on a locked ward and the person in the registrar’s office that you talk to on the phone says if you drop two courses when you get out of the hospital, you can get your money back for them even if it’s after the official deadline, and then when you get discharged the day after the deadline, you drop the two courses but still have to pay $1600 for these courses you aren’t taking, even though the person you talked to said you wouldn’t have to.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 11:46 pm and is filed under University, Crime, Blogosphere. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.