How do colleges react to applicants who have great stats but are mentally ill?

[ilikephysicsalot]

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Someone mentioned Carleton and Macalaster, and I would add Oberlin. Up to you.

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<p>Thanks for the school recommendations. For a while my dream school was Caltech but I heard they are unfriendly to the mentally ill (apparently they had three suicides this semester). Maybe I should go to a small liberal arts school for the same type of environment. Which liberal arts schools have good programs in the maths and sciences?</p>

<p><a href=“your%20call,%20but%20you%20can%20say%20you%20had%20a%20%22chronic%20illness%22%20and%20your%20GC%20can%20say%20the%20same”>quote</a>,

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<p>Won’t the schools be worried that my chronic illness might return and prevent me from attending there?</p>

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You understandably don’t give a lot of details (such as whether you were hospitalized, or how you are doing now) but you should know that at Harvard, I have read, 1/3 of students are on anti-depressants.

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<p>That’s an amazing statistic. I once read that the lifetime prevalence of mental illness is 46%. This means one in two people walking down the street with you is, has, or will have suffered from a mental illness in their lifetime.</p>

<p>No, I have not been hospitalized (but I should have been). Right now I’m out of school and recovering steadily. Everything should clear up by the time I get to college, but I’m afraid it might come back under stress. I’ve already been depressed three times.</p>

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I have a tangential question. One of my kids had a pretty precipitous drop in grades beginning in 10th grade, seemed sad a lot, . . . We decided to move him out of the public hs and have him repeat his junior year at a private school. Since that decision he has met with a therapist and been diagnosed with depression. I have every hope that he’ll receive successful treatment, but of course part of me can’t help but wonder how we explain this on a college app. The slip (fall, actually) in his grades was not a lazy kid–it was a depressed kid. How do we explain that when it’s time to start applying? I’ve been through the process once with my oldest, and am honestly trying to remember if there was a place on the application that made sense to divulge something like that.

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<p>I hope your child is alright. Good luck with the treatment process, it can be pretty hit-or-miss sometimes (but 80% of depressed people recover) You can always divulge it in the additional information section on the common app if you so desire, and if your school doesn’t use the common app they usually have a spot for that stuff too.</p>