I’ve never been diagnosed with mental illness or received mental-health help. But I believe I needed it when I was in my late teens.
I moved from suburban Colorado to Boston in 1977 to attend Boston University and ended up spending the second half of my freshman year and my sophomore year wandering around Boston disconnected from almost all of my peers and sporadically attending classes.
With 45 years of hindsight, it’s easy to explain away my behavior and the lack of connection I felt with the world as a college student. I can blame it on hyper homesickness. I can point to my decision to move off campus. I can blame the Blizzard of 1978 for keeping me out of school for two weeks and dimming my academic ardour.
But excuses are excuses and they don’t explain why I slept 10, even 12 hours a day. They don’t explain why my outlook on the world around me swayed between extremes: Some days I felt excited and inspired. I made lists laying out school work I needed to get done and resolved to get back to class. The next day would come and I would wake up at 1 p.m. unmotivated and experiencing a sickening feeling bordering on terror as I anticipated a task as simple as making coffee.
Even in an era when letters rivaled telephone calls as a preferred communication method, I couldn’t keep my behavior hidden from my parents. I finished freshman year with a report card that read: “Withdraw,” “Incomplete,” “D.” I didn’t bother to tell them about the fourth course I lasted in two weeks before the teacher told me to get out and not come back.
My mother fretted and my dad threatened to send me to community college before enlisting me and my siblings in a two month-long expedition to Guatemala. I returned to Boston to start my sophomore year in worse shape than before.
I had an apartment and a roommate. I didn’t spend much time in the apartment and I rarely hung out with him. I started sleeping in the back stacks of BU’s library — my one consistent hangout — and I roamed Cambridge and Boston, frequenting the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s main buildings where I slept in classrooms, or the lofts built by design students, or in a chair in the all-night student union snack shop.
The pair of friends I met in my freshman year moved off campus by the time I was a sophomore and I didn’t meet new friends. I dated once but never called her back until too much time had passed. A meal usually amounted to a muffin or a sub. Some days I ate, some days I didn’t.
My parents’ warnings about repeating my disastrous freshman year got me to class semi-consistently and I managed a C+/B average and spent a couple evenings a week working at the school paper.
But I couldn’t maintain focus on my school work or initiate an enduring acquaintance. A newspaper clipping, a bulletin-board flyer, or a book would catch and galvanize my attention — but only for a short while — and then I was on to something else.
Things came to a head in the spring when my growing feelings of anxiety prompted me to walk into BU’s Student Health Services office and ask to speak to someone. The doctor who saw me seemed irritated with my attempt to explain the way I was feeling and recommended, after a couple minutes, that I start dating.
When the academic year ended, I spent a couple of weeks with my aunt and uncle in New Jersey before heading home. They embraced me with love, didn’t ask a lot of questions about what was going on with me, and tolerated my goofy attempts to make anchovy quiche and launch a painting project I never completed.
I don’t know what changed or clicked inside me when I started my junior year. I fell in love. I had roommates who became friends. I went to class and pushed my grades up to a B+ average, and even took extra classes.
I do know that when I needed mental-health help, when I was barely speaking to people, I didn’t ask for it or get it.
I bring up my darker past now because mental health is at the forefront of public conversation with athletes and performers urging people to get help. COVID-19 has underscored the value of timely and thorough mental-health care.
The state website, mass.gov, lists this 24-hour number for anyone experiencing a mental-health crisis: 1-877-382-1609. Please call it if you even suspect you need it.
