Dennis Claxton wrote:
>
> Joanna wrote:
>
> >It's totally fucked up. The high-school kids I know wind up having
> >homework the ENTIRE summer to prepare for AP classes.
>
> It gets worse:
>
It was always pretty bad. Back in the '50s there were enough suicides and suicide-attempts at the University of Michigan that the University had a systematic policy of suppressing any public announcement of them. And of course, denying that the 'problem' existed meant among other things doing _nothing_ to prevent it.
And since depression and bipolar were seldom diagnosed in teenagers or college students until the last couple decades, there would always have been a goodly representation of mentally ill students on any campus. After I had been diagnosed with depression (1984)* I always mentioned it in my classes, and always got a string of students coming to see me to announce that they too (or their sister or their girlfriend or boyfriend, etc) suffered from depression or bipolar. And always among those students were some who were not getting treatment because the attitude of the parents was something of the order of "No child of mine is crazy!"
Most campuses now do have a disability concerns office, which may or may not depending on local conditions be of any use.
Carrol
*This illustrates what I mean. I was diagnosed with depression in my mid-50s but probably had been suffering off and on from it since my 'teens. Ditto 10s of thousands of others over those decades.