Mind games

“You must be more cheerful now that the weather’s colder,” the woman said. She tilted her head slightly and smiled at me.

I puzzled over the connection. Colder = more cheerful because…I can drink hot chocolate?  Break out the cashmere sweaters? Feel schadenfreudishly gleeful as the flu mows down undergrads?

“Because it reminds you of Colorado,” she finally prompted, gently. She looked pleased at her insight.

“Ah, right,” I murmured, nodding, thinking, “…this woman is insane.”

Which, really, is a disconcerting assessment to make of one’s therapist.

One would think that VT would have a rockin’ mental health facility, given the audience at hand. There’s the 25,000 undergrads, for starters, rife with early adulthood issues and insecurities. There’s the not-so-distant specter of the April 16 shootings.  And then there’s the grad student population, which may be the unhappiest of all. According to a 2004 study, almost 50% of the graduate students at Berkeley reported emotional or stress-related issues, and almost 10% had considered suicide.

Of course, those numbers are way too low.

I suspect Berkeley-ites are not truly representative of the broad grad student population, given their innate sense of geographical and cultural superiority.  In darkest December, Berkeley students remind themselves, “I could be freezing my ass off in Madison right now,” and the resulting boost of relieved self-congratulation inches them above despondency.

An alternate explanation is that the majority of the students were too stressed to answer the survey.  They were staring at their computers, desperately trying to massage 3 years’ worth of accumulated data and an r^2 of 0.15 into something worthy of a cap and gown.

In my estimation, 95% of all grad students suffer from feelings of intellectual inadequacy and floundering hopelessness.  Of the blissfully immune remainder, 4% are so non-introspective that they’re unaware they should be suffering such feelings. The rest are geniuses whose planet-sized brains have small moons in orbit around them; their private agonies–whether to publish in Nature or Science–are more exalted than ours.

At periodic intervals the Walker/Bates household is wrapped in deep gloom, and we achieve a 100% “Extremely Bummed” rating. Unfortunately, shared misery is no less personal misery. After a while it became apparent that obsessive, self-flagellating thoughts were a poor use of my limited mental resources, so I put my soggy emotions in the hands of professionals at the counseling center.  I will be cured, I thought. I will end up happy, or at least de-miseried.

It took me only 3 sessions–2 hours–to conclude that my counselor was inept, indifferent, or simply clueless. “I’ll give her just one more chance,” I thought. But the appointment was canceled and rescheduled, and then rescheduled again. Five weeks went by, and by then I had figured out my own attitude adjuster: hiking was key, as were friends, and sleep, and exercise, and nightly doses of the Daily Show. And the prospect of the semester ending made me positively ebullient. Talking to someone who couldn’t remember who I was (“How’s entomology going?”) did little for my spirits.

Luckily, my counselor gave me an out. The day before the appointment she left a voice mail message pleading mono, a flooded office, and a looming grant deadline. If I planned to commit suicide in the next 24 hours she could possibly fit me in, but otherwise…would I mind…?

I happily called her back to let her know that all was fine, and I’d be in touch to reschedule.