SFU’s Health and Counselling Services need to provide better service

[dropcap]M[/dropcap]y story with mental health officially begins in my senior year of high school, when I was diagnosed with anxiety. My doctor discovered that my intestines were literally empty — I had stopped eating — and were digesting themselves because there wasn’t any food to digest instead. Given a prescription for therapy and antacids to combat the physical symptoms, I was sent on my way.

It took me six months to actually go to therapy. It was August, and I was leaving for my freshman year of university in three weeks. According to my therapist, I should’ve been having two appointments per week minimum. She gave me a list of therapists she knew in British Columbia, but therapists were the last thing I wanted to think about upon arriving here. I was in a new country attending a new school. I believed this fresh start would somehow magically reconfigure my brain chemistry and make me healthy. The opposite occurred.

Panic attacks happened two or three times a day, I couldn’t talk in class, and the idea of approaching TAs during office hours sounded like my worst nightmare. I was also becoming depressed. Mistakenly feeling unloved and unwanted, I broke up with my boyfriend, stopped texting friends from home, and became flakey with friends at university. I found every excuse to stay in my dorm on weekends.

To this day, I have not made an attempt to seek help from the Health and Counselling Center, nor have I contacted any of the therapists that were recommended to me. Considering the preceding three paragraphs, this may sound self-sabotaging. Let me explain.

Problem one: the irony surrounding anxiety is that it makes you too anxious to get help. The irony surrounding depression is that you’re certain nothing could help you. So, why even bother?

Problem two: my residence advisor warned it could take up to a month to get a consultation. To a depressed brain, that screams, “Why even try?”

Problem three: you’re allowed six appointments per term before the student health insurance stops covering them. I could gripe about this for all eternity. Why is there a limit on how much help the most vulnerable demographic can receive? I was worried I would ‘use up’ my appointments on trivial problems, and then be ‘SOL’ later if my problems worsened. I was supposed to have two appointments per week, not once every two weeks.

I do have a friend who sought help from the centre. The results were even more dissuading than my own doubts. My friend was told the centre “wasn’t taking appointments right now,” with no hint as to when she should return. She has since dropped all of her classes and moved home to focus on recovery.

Nothing is more anxiety-inducing than the idea of going to the front desk (you can’t make appointments online), confessing to needing help for something incredibly stigmatized, and being turned away. Admitting to needing help puts you in an incredibly vulnerable position, and this system of in-person admittance only exacerbates the feeling. Being turned down after working up the courage to ask for help is an indescribable nightmare.

The second friend was able to make an appointment, but was put on anti-depressants that didn’t work out for her in the end. According to her, she had to wait months before they changed her medication.

You don’t need to be mentally unstable to understand why this system is unappealing. For most students, especially international ones, the university’s health centre is the only option, for both financial and geographical reasons. Exploiting already miserable students by setting a cap on how much assistance they can have is inhumane.

It isn’t enough to offer the service; you have to be good at it, too.