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From the universities where madness and creativity meld into one, to produce the artists and visionaries of the world, comes a window into the lives and world of these mad collegians. This column will present the lives of different college students and how their personal journeys interact with the institutions of which they are a part. The first story is my own recent experience, when my life of frenzy met a third semester of college in a small town. In upcoming columns, the complex and beautiful lives of others will be given a voice.
There comes a time in life when the coffee pot just needs to be shattered. Unfortunately, the most opportune time to engage in such activity is not when living in close proximity to four other sane people with a rampant caffeine addiction. The ideal thing to use to break the coffee pot is, also, not your hand. Nobody tells you how many tiny little pieces of glass can be produced from one previously solid object, until all of those pieces suddenly materialize with the strange desire to have intimate relations with your hand.
Thus, after completely non-divine intervention, I landed myself, with a bandaged hand, sitting in front of a counselor who would rather have been dealing with some kid on crack instead of me. The funny thing about counseling centers in small colleges is they tell the students who ingest harmful products to stop doing so, and tell the students who do not that they have to—both on pain of social probation, institutionalization or expulsion.
After about 15 minutes of attempting to explain my situation of hallucinations and wild energy to a middle-aged woman with three kids, a white picket fence and a husband she called “darling dearest,” she decided as quickly and haphazardly as if she had been choosing what to eat for lunch that I was bipolar and needed to be on lithium right away. Now that my random diagnosis had been drawn from a hat, I wanted another rabbit. Instead of a second go for something white and fluffy, I got an immediate referral to the psychiatrist, whom I flatly refused to see.
Getting me to take lithium would be like trying to nail Jell-O to a tree. However, this entire process still leaves the Jell-O looking like it got acupuncture with steak knives. One of these particular steak knives was the name I was given: “community disturbance.” Aside from being way too many syllables to shout comfortably across the quad, I was completely dehumanized to the level of a “problem.” Quite honestly, I do not think I rank on par with campus racism, sexism and horrible cafeteria food, though I thank the health center for kindly considering me just as potentially dangerous.
Many disgruntled calls later, I finally got the health center to agree to allow me to see an off-campus mental-health professional, and subsequently be out of their hair. The policy for me now is: “If we don’t see it or hear about it, it doesn’t exist.” But if they do, let us just say my preferred Jell-O flavor is raspberry.