When my car wheeled onto this campus in 2023, with its beautiful infrastructure, banyan trees, deers and little signs asking you to stay motivated and positive, I remember having suppressed all those headlines I’d read, all those warning signs people had sent me when I received my admission mail. For a girl desperately trying to realise her dreams, entering this place well into adulthood seemed like entering a world full of opportunities. And indeed, it is such a world. This campus has, for years, been witness to people realising their dreams – making the impossible possible and being a home to world-changing ideas and exchanges.
It is a place where success stories are made possible.
But for years on end, this place has also been witness to people’s first anxiety attacks and breakdowns, home to the development of the most unhealthy coping mechanisms. How else do you keep up here?
“This has never happened to me before”, I remember my friend saying as she panted, realising she was having her first panic attack. With a highly stressful but, more importantly, competitive environment where a lot of people are thrown in right after graduating as toppers from their high schools, very often, this place pushes you to the edge. So much that you do not realise you have reached it. I remember her also saying, “But I am not worried about anything”, because admitting your problem is admitting defeat.
Admitting you are going through something is admitting that you failed to keep it together. You can compare your sleep cycles and admit whose is worse – but only to emphasise how you are still functioning and how you are handling it well enough on your own. To reach out and say you are struggling often causes a stigma among your peers that looks like concern. And so, even when someone is actually concerned, you are scared to open up and expose your vulnerability.
Mental Health has been given priority on campus in recent times. The availability of psychologists and other initiatives by student organisations have worked to remove the stigma around mental health, provide peer support and attempt to provide a safe space to talk about it. Unfortunately, despite such initiatives, it is hard to defy the cultural norms of the place whose culture seeps into your mind within a month of being here.
In fact, I think a lot of the concern from the Admin surrounding mental health springs from losing the functionality of the “best minds in the country” rather than assuring their safety. So, even if you are able to get over the fear of being judged, there is always the risk of not being taken seriously or your concerns being either amplified or trivialised. For a lot of students, there is also the concern of privacy.
What is lacking is the assurance that you can utilise the space offered, that you can talk about your problems, that you can take a break. You are constantly expected to be an all-rounder and overachiever who can handle any and every crisis on your own.
Because you cannot afford to take a break. You cannot afford to break down.
In fact, as I am writing this, I cannot think of the last time I wrote something just for myself, something that wasn’t a submission to a magazine, a mere piece of poetry about extremely mundane and transient feelings on a crumpled piece of paper that would eventually end up in the trash. Because here, you do not get to pause, to stop and think – or even to sleep. You are scared that if you pause, you will inevitably fall behind – on your schedule, on your readings, on your PoRs, and on the events around campus.
You are also terrified that if you finally stop to realise how you are really feeling, you will break down. And, here, who has time for that?
This is where unhealthy coping mechanisms, ranging from skipping meals to substance abuse, come in. You try depending on peer groups, but they are also the people who you might be racing against. So, “Are you okay?” comes as a scary premise to a conversation that you would regret later in the day. It is a judgement on whether you have been able to keep up and maintain every aspect of your life. Very often, the people at the top, despite all their concerns, do not understand the real reason behind all of this. It is almost expected of students who have spent their whole lives working towards an ideal to suddenly deal with adulting and balance it all.
There is no change in the policy of the institute to consider, accommodate or empathise with people struggling or to pull them out of their distress, to ask them to take a break, to tell them it is alright, once in a while to give up. There needs to be an open conversation about certain mental health and suicides. There needs to be the belief that by sharing your concerns with faculty advisors (even if they feel silly), you would not be reported, and you would not be creating a problem. It should not feel like a disruption to your daily routine if you are low. It should not feel tiring to talk about your problem with others around you. And maybe then, there will be less need to enforce rules that, on some days, only add to the guilt of not being able to keep up.
To blame policies is easier than accepting things yourself, however. Even though it absolutely sucks, I think we need to take care of ourselves and our close ones. It is easy to let all the rush take you over, but what I have learned from the short time I have been here is that the only way to cope is to make the fighting, conscious choice of not letting all of it affect you. It is to allow yourself the time to slow down, maybe cry a little. It is to tell yourself that it is alright to not find the motivation, it is alright not to feel your best, it is alright to find it hard to cope, it is alright to find it hard to keep up, and it is alright to fail.
Article 19 