York U stigma ruling is a step backward
Enlightened treatment of the mentally ill can only come through candour and plain speaking. Let’s talk, as one prominent campaign says, and I wish we would. It would be tragic to slide backward into silence and shame, which is what a York University student and the Ontario Human Rights Commission have managed to do.
Thanks to them, students with mental-health disabilities diagnosed by a doctor can ask York for “accommodations” that will help them in class and work placements. But now they don’t have to say what the disability is because that would “label” them and create “stigma.” I disagree. As people — millennials in particular — write freely and bravely on social media, in blogs and books about mental illness, ancient stigmas lessen.
Accommodations for students who feel unable to cope are many: peers to take notes for you, sitting at the front or away from windows to reduce distraction, another student to walk to class with and sit with, deadline extensions, a coach to help edit essays, a separate private room to write exams in, extra exam time, exams scheduled later in the day for fatigue reasons.
The York student just has to ask, and it must be given.
At this point even kindly Marc Wilchesky, York’s executive director of counselling and disability services, is a bit taken aback. He doesn’t want to snoop or put up barriers, he says, just match the help with the reason it is needed. As the Star’s Diana Zlomislic has reported, the number of university students with mental-health problems, whether temporary or permanent, is ballooning. York used to have a handful but last year it had 1,200.
An impressive Queen’s University 2015 study in the Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability says the number of students formally registered as mentally disabled in Ontario universities increased by 67 per cent between 2006 and 2011. The rise is matched internationally, with the phrase “rising tide” actually being used in the U.S.
The reasons? Medications are better and human rights laws have improved, the study says. But students are a rights-demanding bunch, sometimes to their own detriment.
These students are on a collision course with mental-health advocates saying not all mental illnesses are the same, or even similar, and more information and openness will mean more understanding. Autism and bipolar disorder? They are facts, not sources of shame. The legal requirement that a stigmatizing diagnosis be a secret from helpful universities smells of mould and asylums.
In fact, professors may make bad guesses about what ails a student — humans are like that — and that doesn’t help build an intellectual bridge.
Universities are a battleground, with rising tuition, most teaching done by adjunct profs while tenured professors do obscure research in a cocoon, a phalanx of highly paid administrators swallowing the budget, quarrels over whether degrees should train intellectually or train for jobs, and many courses seeming frankly fringe-like.
It obscures the central element, which is the learning itself, for whatever purpose. Professors and students are on an intellectual mission together, just as a planeful of passengers has a common objective, to get somewhere, possibly without comfort cats.
The student is not alone, saying “me me me” like the Onion’s area man confirming “6,071 completely independent variables must be in perfect synchrony at any given moment for him to feel OK.” Students have to make accommodations for the university structure too. If they can’t, perhaps university is not for them.
The fight over mental illness “labels” continues to the point where I rarely write about it. What once were nouns have become clauses, the acronyms are bewildering and readers are lost. I myself dislike “disability,” especially in reference to temporary states of young people away from home, but I won’t harp.
Navi Dhanota, the student behind the lawsuit, told Zlomislic she had to be diagnosed with six conditions and told the University of Toronto about them “so she could write her exams in a smaller room instead of the gym, where the sounds of hundreds of people furiously writing created an enormous distraction.”
This puzzles me. Exam rooms are silent. And what if her smaller room became claustrophobic? Hard to predict. With each year, the smaller room will become more crowded. Perhaps exams could be written outdoors in the quad. No, grass allergies. Really? Prove it. Don’t have to.
If Dhanota has handed students a dubious gift, her lawyer goes further. “Having a medical professional confirm disability or taking the word of the person themselves that they have a disability should be sufficient.” But what if they’re scamming, as panicked students will sometimes do? The Ontario Human Rights Commission’s new chief, Renu Mandhane, calls this a triumph. But how so?
Dhanota is now getting a PhD at York in critical disability studies. Which ones? I don’t know. hmallick@thestar.ca