A curious convenience of going to an Ivy League school is how easy it is to evaluate social issues by walking into the gym. For example, go to the first floor of Pottruck and hop on a treadmill (or more fashionably, an elliptical) - really at any time of any day - and you will find yourself sitting on sociological pay dirt: droves upon droves of Penn students, some of them possibly underweight, running themselves into a state of exhaustion.
You don't have to pay the cost of admission to see the show: Penn has been nice enough to window the place entirely, giving even the casual passerby a glimpse into the strangeness of this cardio-manic subculture.
What, then, is the culture from which this not-quite-ostensibly problematic subculture stems? According to Sonia Pascal, the head of Penn 4 Choice, these issues of body image are rooted in "an overall attitude of uber-competitiveness"- an attitude that extends throughout the school.
"It is clear that our work-work-work approach in the classroom has resulted in a correspondingly thin-thin-thin attitude toward physical appearance," she says. "An environment has been created in which having a 'perfect body' is seen as a near prerequisite to working out [on the first floor of the gym]; 'working out' has effectively become synonymous with 'putting oneself on display.'"
Not everyone seems to believe that this "first floor syndrome" actually exists - or at least not with such a negative connotation. Gloria Gay, Associate Director of the Penn Women's Center, sees the "popularity of working out" on campus as nothing more than healthy stress relief.
"Across the board," she says, "men tend to be more physically active than women. We commonly understand and accept that this activity is their way of dealing with stress." She then points out that "women have historically been more inclined to talk through their troubles," which, while certainly useful, "leaves their stress-relieving mechanisms somewhat unbalanced." In her opinion, "an increase in working out" is the way in which many girls "balance out this solution."
Yet while Gay believes that the "scene" of Pottruck's first floor is not quite the overt indicator of the unhealthy or the dangerously-competitive that some make it out to be, she agrees that this competitiveness "absolutely does reveal itself in other channels of the University."
What might some of these other channels be? Pascal places part of the blame on the culture of Penn itself. She describes "a lot of empty rhetoric regarding the virtues of community" at the school, which she further describes as being "a very decentralized institution" where "the idea of 'caring about your fellow student' has become a fractured one." Pascal also considers the presence of the "Penn curve" to be an influential factor in the shaping of students' collegiate psyches, creating a "pressure cooker" of comparative thinking in which everyone's lens becomes a mirror, and mirror, a lens.
In elevating this sense of competition amongst its students from a figurative subtext to an actual "way of things," Pascal believes that Penn culture - while obviously a facilitator of high achievement - is often "guilty of taking too passive an approach" in acknowledging the fact that "a high-achieving student body is most likely going to be a stressed one as well." And not only stressed, but "unqualified to deal with that stress internally."
While Pascal assigns much of this blame to Penn-specific attributes, Fran Walker, the Director of Student Life, does not perceive these issues to be unique to Penn in any respect. "I think that whenever you have a group of very bright, very ambitious 18-22 year olds, if they are all in one place, and they are not sure what they are going to do after they graduate, this breeds stress, worry and competition."
Gay agrees with Walker that the issue lacks specificity to Penn - adding that she believes there is "a tendency to overestimate the role [of all colleges]" in the induction of stress-related mental health problems among students: "I think we are no different than any other school," she says. "In this day and age, kids develop issues of stress at an increasingly younger point in their lives. More and more people are coming to college with their mental health concerns already having been brought to the surface."
Pascal does not quite see it that way. "Yes, we come to college with the same tendencies for coping (with adversity) that we've had since we were children. In some way, we are always in search of control over things," she explains. "The difference is that when we apply control in an environment lacking support structures, it often manifests itself in more detrimental ways."
In her eyes, one such manifestation is the aforementioned "first floor syndrome," and the negative sense of body image that saturates the campus as a result. "Too many girls here are too skinny, period," asserts Pascal. "Within the sorority system, for example - and others are guilty of this too - there appears to exist a pressure to physically resemble a certain 'model' ideal." The problem, she adds, is that this ideal is "unrealistic and (more importantly) unhealthy."
And yet, while the preceding notions of "negative body image" and "hyper-competition" at Penn are almost certainly grounded in both logic and accuracy, a prevailing question still seems to be whether or not these things really, specifically, matter? Isn't anorexia, to put it plainly, a Rich Girl's Disease? Aren't there, like, starving children in Africa? Doesn't the logic behind, say, "taking 21 shots for your 21st birthday" torque so hard by now under the strain of trying to reconcile the collegiate/cool/explicable with the supremely, unconscionably stupid that you figure we'd just. put our energy elsewhere? Might it be appropriate to suggest that these issues don't exist to be tackled but rather to safely quarantine failure within our own brand of US News & World Report self-reasoning?
By obsessing about mental health, are we really just wimping out?
According to Joshua Matz, the president of the Drug and Alcohol Resource Team (DART) and a founding member of the new Mental Health Coalition, the answer is "absolutely not." In fact, he cites variations on these hypothetical conclusions as a huge part of the problem and as a significant stumbling block in Penn's efforts to increase mental health awareness. "I think we are acculturated to deal with emotions in a certain way," Matz says. "Especially at an Ivy League institution, I think we have a tendency to intellectualize and to devalue the mental health concerns of our peers and of ourselves. We have a tendency not to take responsibility for our emotions, to say 'comparatively speaking, these are not real problems.'"
Matz explains that one of the major hurdles we have to overcome in spreading mental health awareness is a contemporary culture that values, to a fault, "the 'medicalization' of our psychology." In modern analysis, "we want cognitive results, we want information, we want data, we want statistics," Matz declares. "There is a perceived truth to the sciences, just as there is a perceived fickleness to the humanities: we find comfort in definite understanding."
"Let's say, for example, I break my foot. We diagnose this by saying something concrete, such as 'You have a broken bone in your foot'. What happens though, if, instead of breaking my foot, my trouble is that I drink too much, or that I don't eat enough? Problematically, we diagnose this by saying something concrete as well: you are an alcoholic, you are anorexic, and so on and so forth."
What is wrong with these diagnoses? According to Matz, the problem lies in the idea of "framing mental health issues within unwavering dichotomies - by perpetuating a you-either-have-something, or you-don't attitude of perception and diagnosis alike." That is to say, we are also, consequently, perpetuating a scenario in which we can only consider the most extreme ends of cases as actual matters of mental health.
"There are way more people with drinking problems on Penn's campus than there are literal 'alcoholics,'" Matz points out, "just as there are way more people with eating disorders than there are anorexics, and just as there are way more people who are depressed than who are suicidal. By associating everything with extremes, we fail to recognize the idea that there is a middle ground, a third category of mental health that is no less worthy of attention, and no less a cause for concern."
Gay seconds this notion, expressing her belief that, as a student body, we have become "desensitized" to certain behaviors - behaviors that we should instead be interpreting as "preliminary matters of mental health concern." Continues Gay: "In a normal environment, when a friend of ours gets in the habit of saying, 'No, I don't want to go out with you tonight,' or 'No, I don't want to wake up for class this morning,' we should see that behavior as a potential early indicator that said friend might be experiencing some form of depression. Instead, what we say to ourselves is, 'Well hey, everyone here thinks like that. I know I don't feel like going out sometimes. And who would want to wake up for class?'" And so whether someone is displaying genuinely problematic behavior or simply acting out various collegiate norms, Gay estimates that our predisposition is to treat their actions as a case of the latter, and ignore the "mental health" consequences of their actions completely.
When I ask Matz what he believes to be the root of this dichotomization of mental health on campus, one answer in particular seems surprising: he hypothesizes that one reason we have a tendency to ignore matters of personal health (both physical and mental) is the fact that we are, in his words, "so smart."
In Matz's opinion, Penn's self-diagnosed "intelligence" leads to what he calls "a suspension of causality" in our analysis of our own behavior. "At Penn," he says, "there is a tendency to equate our accumulation of knowledge (on the subjects of mental and physical health) with an unrealistic immunity." In other words, the more we know, the more we start believing in a world where "causality is theoretical, and consequence is dissociated. The belief is that because we have learnt about anorexia or alcoholism [in, say, Intro Psych], we are above [turning to] those patterns of behavior. But at what point is our idealism coming at the expense of self?" he asks. "And at what point does it cease to be idealism at all?"
All of this is to say that, on the surface, the debate over, and interest in, "mental health awareness" seems to split itself in two. On one hand, some find it worth pursuing as a Big Issue we're talking about, whether or not it is merely hype or in fact grounded in medical diagnoses. On the other hand, some find it worth pursuing that a person would try to use the elliptical on an empty stomach. Yet what is most important to note, perhaps, is that - whether Big or small, specific or broad - each individual logic on mental health at some point converges to form, not a group, but a group of groups which aims for the lofty goal, not of pursuing mental health awareness, but rather of pursuing the awareness that mental health is not an "issue" - that it just is, and is everywhere.
