What has been your mental health experience at the University of Waterloo?

In a word; war. Granted, all I have is speculation since I’ve been too afraid to share this with any professional.

As I am sure any Engineering student could attest, it is a challenge to not only get by, but to do well also requires a great deal of effort. When failures inevitably occurred (for the purposes of this piece, failure refers to failing the goal of “performing ‘well’ academically”), I found myself struggling to cope with it, struggling to motivate myself for next time. I think that’s how the second me began to develop. It’s not quite a wholly separate personality, but it’s not a mood either, something in between. Its function seems to be to act as a motivator in the form of a whip. If I perform poorly (say on a test, an assignment, job postings etc.), the fierceness of the resulting mental barrage is proportional to the magnitude of the failure. A precarious arrangement but with the best intentions.

Except it went beyond the scope of its original purpose (not that this was specifically intended or contracted). It became a machine of demotivation as opposed to its original purpose. It would constantly remind me of failures that occurred days or weeks prior, it would never allow me to let it go and move on. A stream of thought (for example, paying attention in class) would be entirely, and suddenly interrupted with a mocking internal dialogue. I guess a good way to describe it would be a polar flip. Except it’s not a mood change, rather a smooth river turned into a hurricane. A calm stream of thought is now suddenly several different voices all chastising me, screaming at me at once. Imagine 10 of your high school bullies locked inside your head with you. “You suck!”, “You’re a piece of shit!”, “Why are you still alive?”, and of course flashes of various ways to kill myself, all while I’m trying to write down calculus notes. These “flashes” are not within my control and at its worst, can occur with no trigger. That’s the scariest part of it, how suddenly and without warning it happens. When they do happen, my only goal becomes to wrestle my own mind, which is supposed to be mine, back to class, homework, eating, sleeping, etc.

Now, if I want to avoid such episodes, I have to do everything I can to make sure I don’t “fail”, whatever that means in the particular context. Sometimes that means not trying at something new or different or trying to succeed in school out of fear instead of for other goals. School is not just about learning or getting a degree any more, now it’s also about making sure I don’t lose in a fight against myself.

What resources did you want to access and what were you actually able to use? Did you find those resources useful?

I am not very well informed about the resources available. I did attend a general counselling session once. I did not find it very useful at all, I did not feel like I could trust the counselor with my experiences. Something I would have liked to see here on campus is a dedicated psychologist, as opposed to just counselors.

What did you wish you had known at the beginning of this journey with mental health?

Complacency is a killer. Any amount of acceptance or justification for self abuse causes it to be internalized as a normal behaviour and soon, that’s exactly what it becomes. The beginning of the journey is the best place to know about that to be able to stop it before the thought is too deep rooted.

What message do you have for others who may be experiencing something similar as a student at the University of Waterloo?

Accept failures, mistakes, and weakness when they happen. It cannot be changed. Objectively, the method with the best return (in terms of success) is to only think constructively towards the next goal. Besides the obvious downsides of beating yourself up, nothing can make you fail again more easily than distracting yourself with previous failures.