The Presidency and Mental Health

Along with my current and former work wives, I will be attending the ACE annual meeting in D.C. starting Wednesday, Feb. 25. If you’ll be there, get in touch and let’s get together.

The writer is a current president.

Even though I know, intellectually and experientially, how impactful it is when educators, particularly those at the “top,” so to speak, share challenging experiences with their students, there is one area where I have not: mental health.

The pandemic was challenging for all of us. For me, two additional challenges layered onto that era. One was institutional existence. My institution was involved in the world of major transitions—staffing reductions, program cuts, mergers, closures—that so many faced, and still face. I believed for a period that my institution would close under my watch (it didn’t). Another was the death of my father, who was definitely thrilled to watch his son’s ascent. In darker moments, mourning was eclipsed by a sort of relief that he wouldn’t have to witness my failure.

I found myself thinking about bizarre scenarios in which my institution found ways to have me secretly killed, so my demise could be an excuse for closure. I would have repeated moments when I envisioned myself pointing an imaginary gun at my face or into my mouth. There were some imagined hangings in there as well. And, while driving over longish distances, I repeatedly thought how easy it would be to just veer off the road into a tree. Someone else could then figure out what to do with the damn institution. (I have never written about any of this, and doing so now is not entirely unterrifying.)

What seems strangest is how normal this came to feel. I didn’t realize how wrong things had become. I am grateful that when I went for my annual physical and was asked the routine question of whether I had considered harming myself, I said yes. Or, at least, I said something like “sort of.” From there began an intervention with an online crisis counseling service, talk therapy, and, ultimately, medication.

My initial diagnosis was somewhere between moderate and severe depression. That seemed extreme to me at the time—I wasn’t severely depressed, I was running an entire institution—and the time I spent thinking about ending it all (my life, not the institution’s) was pretty minimal. But whatever. I liked my social worker well enough, and I made rapid progress according to her, which maybe she tells every patient. The ambitious leader in me, even the severely depressed version, still liked getting good grades.

The medication was a sticking point. I didn’t want to do go onto antidepressants, and I resisted for weeks. Somehow, doing that would make it “real” in a way that the talk therapy didn’t. Finally, she got me to agree to a low dose; it wouldn’t solve everything but would make life a little easier while I worked through my issues in talk therapy. As an educator who has made “scaffolding” a key aspect of my pedagogical work, this should have been easy for me to understand, but I wasn’t an educator in that room. I was a patient—a mental health patient. That was radically new for someone used to being a role model for others. What was I role modeling now?

A lot, actually, if anyone ever knew about it. I used to find it really strange that a student could, one day in class, be amazing in their contributions and the next day catatonic and lethargic. I also didn’t really understand how a student who had clearly been able to write great papers would have a stretch of time when they were unable to produce even a shoddy piece of work. They would say it was because of their mental health. Was it? I was understanding of them because I had to be, on an intellectual level and to follow school policies, but I didn’t really get it.

Now I did. I still functioned in my job, but I noticed that there were days when I had to postpone a task because I just couldn’t do it, and then, sometimes the very next day, the same task was easy to complete. I started to have moments of recognition, seeing behaviors in my students that I was experiencing myself. The students with mental health challenges were becoming role models for me.

How amazing it would have been, and would still be, if I could return the favor. I know, from treasured moments of feedback, that there are students who have found their lives a little (or a lot) easier because I exist, given the various identities we share. It isn’t a leap to conclude that students with depression would find it meaningful to know that depression doesn’t have to hold them back from the top job in whatever field they choose. The kind of leadership I have believed in and modeled for so many years could incorporate another dimension of my identity. Leaders should have no shame about their mental health, no fears about others learning about it, and no concerns that it will hold them back, either in actuality or in perception.

And yet, I do. Maybe with time, I won’t. But for now, anonymous writing is the best I can do.