Is It Possible To Succeed At A Demanding University While Struggling With Mental Health?
It’s 2:17 a.m. when my phone buzzes under my pillow. I fumble for it, knock my reading glasses off the nightstand, and when I answer, all I get at first is quiet, gasping crying. It’s my oldest daughter, Lila, three months into her pre-med program at the state’s flagship university—one of the most competitive pre-med tracks in the country. “I don’t know how to do this anymore,” she says, when she can catch her breath. “I’m struggling this much. Am I even supposed to be here?”
I swing my legs out of bed, my sock catches on a loose splinter of the bed frame, and I leave my dog curled on the sheets where he was sleeping. I sit on the bathroom counter so I don’t wake my husband, and I just listen for 20 minutes. She tells me she skipped three organic chem lectures in two weeks, can’t get out of bed before noon most days, cried in the bathroom after her midterm because she got a C minus when everyone else was talking about A minus. She hasn’t told her advisor, hasn’t told her roommate, because everyone here seems to have it together. Everyone posts their internship acceptances and their 3.9 GPAs to their Instagram stories, so she just pretends she’s fine too.
I’d seen glimpses of this in high school, honestly. She’d pull all-nighters for AP exams, then crash for 14 hours and skip a family dinner once because she couldn’t get off the couch. I told her it was just senior year stress, that once she got to college it would get better, that all her hard work would pay off. I was wrong. I’d bought into the same lie everyone else does: if you work hard enough to get into a competitive school, you’ll be fine once you’re there.
I drove up the next morning. I stopped at the coffee shop by campus she loves, got her an oat milk latte with extra cinnamon, and let myself into her dorm. Her desk was stacked three high with textbooks, unwashed mugs ringed with coffee stains on every available surface, and a half-eaten granola bar was crumbled under her bed. She was sitting on the floor in a faded high school soccer hoodie, hair unbrushed, and didn’t even get up when I came in. We just sat there on the floor drinking coffee, and that’s when we started making small changes, not big overhauls.
First, I didn’t give her the two options everyone expects—either drop out, or suck it up and push through. Instead I asked her the one question that changed everything: what’s one small thing we can take off your plate right now? She thought for a minute and said the extra art history class she’d signed up for, just because she thought it would look good on her med school application. She was taking 18 credits, and that 3 credit class was sucking 10 hours a week she didn’t have. We walked over to the registrar’s office that same day and dropped it. That’s it, just one small thing.
She was terrified to tell her advisor what was going on, thought it would mean she was unfit for pre-med. I didn’t email the advisor for her, but I sat with her in the dorm common room while she wrote the email. We kept it short, no big dramatic explanation: “I’ve been struggling with my mental health lately and am behind on my upcoming lab report. Would I be able to get an extension of three days?” Her advisor wrote back an hour later, said of course, and asked her to come in for a meeting the next day. When we went, her advisor told her more than half the pre-med students she works with go through this exact same thing their first year, most just don’t talk about it. She helped Lila apply for disability accommodations for her generalized anxiety—something we’d never formally diagnosed before, because Lila had always performed well enough to hide it in high school. Within a month, Lila had extra time on exams, permission to record lectures instead of rushing to take notes by hand, and a standing appointment at campus counseling.
Last month, six months into her first year, she texted me at 1 p.m. on a Wednesday saying she’d skipped all her classes that day, stayed in bed watching old Gossip Girl reruns, and she was still struggling this much. “Does that mean I’m still failing?” she asked.
I’ve thought a lot about the original question, the one Lila asked that night at 2 a.m.—is it possible to succeed at a demanding university while struggling this much? The answer I’ve landed on is that it all depends on what you call success. If success means a perfect 4.0, getting into your top grad program straight out of undergrad, never missing a class or a deadline, then no, probably not. But that’s never been the kind of success that matters anyway, not really.
Concrete things I tell other parents who ask me about this now: First, stop asking your kid why they can’t keep up, and start asking what one thing you can take off their plate. It doesn’t have to be a whole class, it can be a club they joined that’s stressing them out, or a weekly study group that leaves them feeling worse about themselves. Second, help them ask for small help first. Most people think you need a big dramatic diagnosis or a crisis to get accommodations, but most universities will work with you for small extensions or adjustments just for being upfront about struggling. Third, make them mute all the achievement-focused accounts on their social media. It sounds silly, but Lila said that cutting out the endless stream of perfect wins from her feed cut her anxiety by almost half, because she stopped comparing her messy behind-the-scenes to everyone else’s curated highlight reel.
Last week, Lila sent me a photo. She’s sitting on a rock by the campus lake, her notebook open in her lap, and the C minus she got on her first organic chem midterm is taped to the front cover. She got a B minus on the final, and she’s signed up to volunteer at the campus clinic next semester. She still has bad weeks. She still sometimes skips class to stay in bed. She still texts me crying when she gets a grade lower than she wanted. But she texted me with the photo: “I’m still struggling. But I’m still here.” That’s success enough, for now.
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