Approximate reading time: 2 minutes, 3 seconds
“They took away Catalina’s will to live.” With these words, Catalina’s mother titles the open letter to the community in which she recounts the situation experienced by her daughter, an educational therapy student at the University of Los Andes, who took her own life for not resisting so much pain. Catalina had been subject to academic/labor abuse during her professional practice.
The mother, Catalina Cors Richards, a pediatrician at the Rancagua Regional Hospital, tells us in her letter that Catalina “went to the office to present this situation and no one listened to her. She was treated as “sensitive” as if this was a negative thing. She continues her story by pointing out that Catalina “wrote a letter to the management (signed by half of her class) recounting the mistreatment and irregularities suffered in each of her rotations.”
As is almost always the case in these situations of violence in educational contexts, the institutional response was to try to discredit the victim and silence the complaint by intimidating the fellow signatories of the letter, accusing them of “liars and insults and threat of suspension from boarding school.”
In my university days, academic abuse was so normalized that those students who did not have the tools and conditions to face it were said to give them overwork, which meant a depressive state caused by physical or mental exhaustion.
Symbol of this situation was a man who had been a student at the engineering school and who lived homeless. Many times we saw him sleeping between cardboard stuck to the wall of one of the buildings on Tupper Street. I heard similar situations in other faculties of the University of Chile. Those were different times and today those situations are no longer acceptable or even justifiable.
Mental health was an individual, private and secret issue. Going to a psychiatrist or a psychologist was frowned upon. It was unthinkable that the way in which academic work was carried out could be one of the causes of affecting the mental health of university students. The conclusion was clear: it did not have the capacity to respond to the demands of higher education.
Unfortunately, there are still many academics, as well as professional practice centers that abuse and take advantage of the student body. The consequences are known. A study carried out in 2020 on mental health concluded that 20% of university students would be at risk of suicide in the country. The figures collected by academics from the Universidad Los Andes and Universidad de Talca, together with researchers from the Millennium Nucleus to Improve the Mental Health of Adolescents and Young People, were recorded through a survey applied to more than 5 thousand students from different careers.
Neuroscience has studied that, in states of stress, being in “survival” mode, it is not possible to develop meaningful and quality learning. For this reason, the challenge today is to promote the taste and pleasure of learning, generate climates of trust and emotional security in the classroom, as well as strengthen academic self-esteem, motivation and resilience. And in all of this, the connection between those who participate in teaching-learning plays a main role, especially when there are power relations, such as between teacher and students.
Coexistence among peers and also with academics is a determining variable in mental health, learning and performance. Quality of life is also part of education and it hurts the heart and soul when students like Catalina are robbed of the will to live. Good coexistence is also a challenge in university education.
By Marcelo Trivelli
