Fighting On With Mindfulness

“According to this screening from the health center,” I said to my roommate, “I am not only at risk of an eating disorder, but I show traits of depression, anxiety and suicide.” Even though USC health center’s online self-assessment screenings don't give actual diagnoses, I honestly wasn’t that surprised at my result. I’ve dealt with most of these issues since I was in middle school. My roommate’s reply, however, surprised me. “Well yeah, but everyone struggles with that these days.” It wasn’t that I was surprised that college students struggle with their mental health like I do. Earlier this year USA Today put together a brief look on college mental health, reporting that nearly half of college students have had feelings of hopelessness and cited an assessment from the American College Health Association that most students who struggle with mental health do not seek treatment. With more mental health articles and anecdotes circulating our feeds, as well as places like USC that provide resources, departments and even events centered on mental well-being, it seems that awareness of the issue is removing the stigma of struggling with mental health. But what surprised me that night was how my roommate’s bluntness. If I didn’t already know that my roommate genuinely cares about me, I would have said they were rudely dismissive. To that end, is it possible that in raising awareness of mental health on college campuses we are also normalizing it to the point where people will become dismissive on the issue? It seems counterproductive that for all the articles and Youtube videos that work to normalize mental illness among American adults, there is a possibility that this might backfire and make people have a “meh, what can you do?” approach to the issue. And to the mainstream’s credit, the only time I’ve ever felt this type of dismissiveness was with my roommate...and Internet commenters denying that mental illness in this country is even a real issue at all. With one in five American adults struggling with mental illness in a given year, we as a country can’t afford to be dismissive of those people if we genuinely care about the well-being of all who live here. That might be easy for me to say as a person who has spent much of her college career getting a handle on her mental health, but helping people with mental health issues and placing more research on this topic are worthy endeavors. The point isn’t to coddle, but rather to help people learn how to get through their day-to-day despite also handling life’s lowest moments. Normalizing mental health in to the point of dismissiveness would, in the end, just undermine the work of those trying to remove its stigma.

No Safe Spaces For Echo Chambers

“So the election,” my openly conservative professor remarked during class, “Did all of your friends go to their safe spaces and participate in their protests? They’re totally wasting their time, by the way. Thank God USC isn’t like one of those schools, I can’t stand it.”

I had to take a few deep breaths.

My community involvement often places me in touch with ethnic and activist communities,  and so I hear the word “safe space” get thrown around a lot, usually when addressing topics that could be “triggering” to certain people. The base idea of having a safe space is for someone to be able to voice their opinions, find comfort and support and rest from triggering environments that could take a toll on a person’s mental health.

As a women of color who is a friend to members of various marginalized groups, I absolutely believe that safe spaces ought to exist. They are places where people find support they wouldn’t find anywhere else, support might be vital to a person’s well-being. At the same time, my views on safe spaces come with an asterisk.

And that asterisk is that for the sake of having open discussions across the political spectrum, the protection of safe spaces cannot be taken too far. Last year student reporter Tim Tai at the University of Missouri was harrassed by protesters who were calling for the resignation of now former President Timothy M. Wolfe. To them, having a member of the press record photographs of where they set their base camps was a violation of their safe space, since to them “it’s typically white media who don’t understand the importance of respecting black spaces." 

But the fact that the reporter was also a person of color didn't matter as activists yelled and physically pushed him in his attempt to do his job.

Just a few months before the incident, President Obama already put his two cents on college safe spaces:

I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view. I think you should be able to — anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with ‘em. But you shouldn’t silence them by saying, "You can’t come because I'm too sensitive to hear what you have to say." That’s not the way we learn either.

I'm inclined to disagree that the true point of safe spaces is to coddle people, but I do agree with Obama in the sense that people need to learn from each other through debate and open conversation. But perhaps that one extreme incident at Mizzou was a taste of the political polizarization and close-mindedness often seen in this election. Zealous people who take safe spaces to the extreme are dangerous because they encourage an environment that causes people to be rooted in their opinions. In the end, they will not bother to listen to differing opinions.

As author and Youtuber John Green said in a video after the election results, "I'm sorry that we've let our echo chambers become so sealed off that it is as unfathomable to me why someone would support Donald Trump for president as it is for many Trump supporters why I would support Hillary Clinton."

As members of marginalized groups reach out to their safe spaces in light of Trump’s presidency to mourn and to figure out how to cope with the future it is important that people don’t get too preoccupied with only people who reaffirm their viewpoints.

In order to prevent Trump’s administration and the upcoming Congress from setting the country back 50 years, people NEED to be able to talk to people with other viewpoints and be willing to acknowledge one’s biases and even flaws in their own arguments. As I scrolled through my feeds post-election, my heart hurt for people whom I felt have more to fear from a Trump presidency than I do right now. At the same time, I also felt fear reading posts from friends who refuse to have any association with a Trump supporter “because you clearly have no regard for my well-being and for the issues I stand for.”

There is a time and place for support, but it’s important to remember that echo chambers go both ways. The election reavealed that the country is politically polarized enough. Safe spaces should not be a safe space for close-mindedness.