Mental Health

reading the "Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life" reminded me of "The Collected Schizophrenias Essays" by Esme Weijun Wang, so i wanted to talk more about the presence of mental illness/madness and how it affects our experiences in academics. Esme Wang's chapter, "Yale Will Not Save You", details how her experience at Yale defined her as a schizoaffective person, and how, eventually, the misdiagnosis of Bipolar disorder, the hesitancy to treat and medicate, and the pushout of mentally ill students led to her suicidal and out of school.

I talked about this a bit in my breakout room last night and I might talk about it in my final project, but I thought I'd share it in a post in case I end up going in a different direction with my paper.

I saw a tweet a few days ago and I've been thinking a lot about it ever since. The tweet reads, "we don't talk enough about the imposter syndrome / burnout crossover when you don't think you are allowed to feel burnout. not to be earnest but it's something I've experienced and something I've observed in my friends in the past. you're burnt out but you don't believe you've done enough or, for lack of a better word, earned it."