OPINION
ADDING INSULT TO ILLNESS THE LACK OF LONG-TERM CARE AT CMHS By Tess Robinson
A
s a student who came to Tufts during the first school year of the pandemic, I have been dissatisfied with the lack of long-term care at Tufts mental health services. Counseling and Mental Health Services (CMHS) describes itself as a center for “time-limited counseling services based on students’ individual needs.” Explicitly interpreted: it is a place to get therapy in the interim between getting your own therapist or getting better on your own. As frustrating as that is for students who want to establish a relationship with their counselor, who don’t want to rehash their trauma every few weeks to someone new, who lack the financial means to seek external therapy, or who fear telling their parents they need it, most of us, including 12 TUFTS OBSERVER MAY 2, 2022
me, accepted the absence of long-term care as a sad reality of college mental health services. Until author Grace Talusan came to speak in my Asian American Literature class. Talusan, a Tufts alumna whose memoir The Body Papers won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, spoke to our class in February 2022. Talusan doesn’t mention Tufts by name in The Body Papers, but it has a substantial presence in her narrative as the place where she experienced the most serious depression of her life. She says of her junior year, “I have never been as ill as I was then, and every year since then has been an attempt to swim away from the dark depths of that illness.”
When she came to my class, I knew about those dark times in her life, and I knew that she found her solace in therapy. I didn’t know the long-term therapy she received was at Tufts. Talusan describes her college therapist in The Body Papers, noting the silence that filled the room as she stared at the therapist’s succulent, unable to speak. “At the time, being seen by her was enough to make progress,” she writes. Talusan mentioned to our class that she owes a lot to this therapist for her continual support, for meeting with her several times a week over the course of her time at college, throughout summer vacations and holidays. I thought her therapist was an external provider, a counselor from Medford or
