Opinion: Let’s do more to fulfill UNC’s ideal of campus support

At UNC, we enjoy thinking of ourselves as as a tight-knit community, one where every Tar Heel belongs to the same big, happy family.

Sometimes, this attitude becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. But, in truth, it’s still very easy to feel entirely alone at a school the size of UNC.

This week, we’re taking a look back at the 1995 shooting that left two dead on Henderson Street. There’s little new we can say about the circumstances that led Wendell Williamson to procure a semi-automatic weapon and then unload it into innocent passers-by.

But it is possible — and necessary, we’d argue — to learn something from the way his illness was handled by those close to him and the conditions under which the shooting occurred.

Lapses and discontinuities in Williamson’s psychiatric care seem to be partly to blame. More comprehensively, however, we are reminded that we must continue to acknowledge that the value placed on competitiveness and independence at UNC does few favors for students’ emotional well-being.

The consequences of failing to take these aspects of campus culture into account are rarely as severe as death, but they shouldn’t have to be for us to confront them.

UNC’s counseling and psychiatric resources are already stretched thin, a casualty of being a large public institution beholden to a stingy legislature.

But regardless of the robustness of other professional resources, it remains the responsibility of students, faculty, and other members of the campus community to promote a general attitude toward mental health that encourages and rewards empathy. Here, the term ought to be defined as continual recognition of others’ humanity and the variety of obstacles to well-being that might arise within a community as large as UNC’s.

Many of us find UNC’s community to be more than adequately welcoming. But for a subset of students, especially those from marginalized backgrounds, securing feelings of belonging and inclusion isn’t as easy.

Others see an unhealthy romance in martyring themselves at the altar of the all-nighter.

Even the most involved and outwardly chipper students aren’t immune from the volatile mental landscape typical of the college years. Reach out to them all, but before that, evaluate your own position.

Few people expect college to be easy. It shouldn’t be. But we ought to do everything we can disillusion ourselves of the notion that it must be miserable.

Rather than dispensing inexpert advice ourselves, we encourage you to seek out the services of Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) or Rethink: Psychiatric Illness, a student-run organization that seeks to help students manage their own and others’ emotional well-being in healthy ways.

And no matter how well-adjusted or content we might believe ourselves to be at a given moment, mental health should never be taken for granted. The expectation that every day is a Good Day To Be A Tar Heel and that “that Carolina feeling” is always one of reverent bliss tends to obscure the experiences of those for whom Chapel Hill is not a happy place, for whatever reason.

We have nothing to lose and everything to gain from reminding ourselves that a wide spectrum of mental health issues are as possible and serious here at our beloved UNC as they are anywhere else.