At Yale, a wave of activism forced changes in mental health policies

For decades, the university has required students seeking medical leave to withdraw and reapply. An on-campus suicide sparked a cascade of revisions.

In the weeks following the suicide of Rachael Shaw-Rosenbaum, a freshman at Yale, in 2021, a group Strangers began meeting on Zoom.

Some of them knew Ms. Shaw-Rosenbaum. But many only knew what she had experienced, as she struggled with suicidal thoughts and weighed the consequences of her hospitalization.

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One of them, a doctor in her forties, was told years ago to withdraw from Yale while she was hospitalized after a suicide attempt, an experience which she remembers as being terribly impersonal, “like you were being treated by this big machine.” p>

Another, a classical pianist in his twenties, withdrew from Yale amid bouts of hypomania and depression, feeling, as he did, says, “not only excluded but rejected, cut off and forgotten.” about."

Members of the group, which took the name Elis for Rachael, shared a complaint that Yale's strict policies on mental health leave - requiring students to withdraw without guarantee of readmission, stripping them of their health insurance and excluding them from campus - had penalized students at their most vulnerable.

"We discovered that there were just generations of Yalies who had similar problems, who had been silent for decades and decades," said Dr. Alicia Floyd, the physician and one of the founders of the group. "And we all felt like something had to change."

The organizing that began that day culminated last month in a legal settlement that makes it easier considerably the process of taking sick leave. absence at Yale.

Under the new policy, students...