<p>Just to add to what NJSue said I don’t think the colleges differentiate what the medical reason is nor do I (mental or physical) if your friend can qualify for a medical leave it might be the best avenue. If you are at the end of a semester it might be more difficult.</p>
<p>I guess I’m just so worried because she seems liable to stab herself if things go badly. 
She’s getting lots of help, but these things aren’t quick fixes.</p>
<p>In my experience, and Incomplete is no grade, not a passing grade. I’d guess it varies by school – at mine, you had a year to make up work.</p>
<p>Is she planning on attending school next semester? Do you think she can? Is it too late to apply for a medical leave? </p>
<p>I’d have her talk to the disabilities services offices as well. They’re used to advocating for students and knowing the ins and outs of the system.</p>
<p>Does this friend have parents? This is an example when they should be involved.</p>
<p>ellemenope, I completely agree with you. This really shouldn’t be my job. But her parents don’t want to talk to her since she’s been in the hospital (they never understood how extreme her issues are before), and I’m all she’s got for the time being.</p>
<p>At my university, it is possible to petition for retroactive withdrawal for medical reasons.</p>
<p>If your friend gives the treating healthcare professionals permission, they can help her with documents supporting a medical withdrawal or incomplete. All the Us I’ve ever heard of have disabilities offices on campus that can & DO help students with these issues as they arise. The dean of students can also help. Your friend or her parents with her permission can ask the dean of students & disability office for help in working with the instructors to help her get the medical withdrawal or incomplete(s). </p>
<p>I have heard of retroactive medical withdrawals as well but am not sure how much more complicated those are to obtain. The dean of students should be able to provide that information if you ask about it in general.</p>
<p>You are a very good friend to try to help this difficult situation. Please take good care of YOURSELF too!</p>
<p>If you friend has bipolar disorder, she should be registered with the disabilities office (or dean’s office, if that is where accommodations are handled). Did your friend ever do this?</p>
<p>In order to register, students meet with the disabilities folks or the dean, bringing medical documentation. This is usually done before the semester starts. Then, the student is given a letter for each professor, stating that the student should get certain specific accommodations (extensions on work, extra time, excused absences, etc.). </p>
<p>At no time does the student have to tell the professor what the condition is. The letter should state “medical condition.” The disabilities office and dean know what the situation is, but the professors are supposed to pay attention to the fact that the student presented an official letter, that indicates full review by administrators and a deserving student. They don’t really need to know the details (though in some schools, prof.'s have access to the file in the disabilities office).</p>
<p>That said, professors do have some discretion, especially for excused absences. In my daughter’s school, the deans are pretty darn directive in e-mails to the professors, as in “Thou shalt grant this student an extension.” (She has epilepsy and other things.) But some comply in spirit as well, and others don’t.</p>
<p>During a crisis, there is no way the student (or friend) should be handling this. Is there a parent involved? Your friend should write a release for her parent to communicate with everyone at the school. Your friend is not in good shape for handling this.</p>
<p>The parent should talk with an administrator about this. The parent should get all records, including and especially hospital records, and provide copies to the dean or disabilities person (at this point, I would think a dean). If the parent cannot be a strong, informed advocate, then perhaps an advocate or even lawyer could be involved, if this isn’t settled. A call to NAMI (National Alliance for the Mentally Ill) might help too.</p>
<p>And retroactive action should be possible if the school is not up to par with their response. </p>
<p>If your friend missed too much school to get incompletes (some schools have a policy that a student must withdraw and reapply if two weeks of classes are missed) then it should be a withdrawal th(The point is, your friend is entitled to a “level playing field.” If other students are forced to withdraw after two weeks out of school, including those with mono or cancer or whatever, then a forced withdrawal is probably fair. Check the student handbook.)</p>
<p>If your friend did not register with disabilities or the dean, then a situation like this can crop up, and everyone has to play catch up. You should take heed yourself and register too, if you haven’t already.</p>
<p>PM me if you like.</p>
<p>Is there an Ombudsman at the university? If so, and the Dean is not helpful, the Ombudsman can often help. Going to the office that serves students requiring academic accommodations (called “disability service” above, might be called something different at different campuses) can be very helpful, especially if they are accustomed to advocating for students.</p>
<p>Professors are never put in a position where they are asked to rule on the legitimacy or nonlegitimacy of a medical diagnosis. Professors aren’t medical doctors, but academic professionals. Professors are usually told to refer all of these types of requests to disability services where there are actual people with medical knowledge whose job it is to decide whether or not it’s a legitimate disability, etc.</p>
<p>Known disabilities announced “after the fact” are always subject for suspicion. Did this friend register at the disabilities office in advance? Did she take other actions in keeping with a person that had reason to believe she might have problems? This is no broken leg, this is the “back injury” of my generation. Back injury? Truly do occur, but are sometimes hard to document and were quite often faked or at least “milked” to be more serious than was true.
NOT to say that is the case with the friend, but just pointing out that any time a suspicious claim comes up, that throws skepticism on the real ones.
Case in point- at my last workplace, we had a diagnosed bipolar woman that was missing huge amount of workdays. Probably worked 5 days a month for over a year. She kept claiming her medicine was “messed up” and doctors couldn’t get her balanced. Come to find out, all her medicines required no alcohol, but she was boozing it up every other day. Once this was documented, she was let go. That led to skepticism about the truthfulness of her diagnosis, and her efforts to keep herself healthy, and made it tough on all others after her.</p>
<p>Re “after the fact”: most colleges will require a student with a disability to register with the disabilities services office and self disclose to the professors with the appropriate paperwork prior to receiving any classroom accommodations for disability. Disability can be physical, learning, or psychological. I am not actually permitted to provide “retroactive” accommodations for students who fail to self-disclose. I can only provide them after registration and self-disclosure. So if a students gets registered with a disability in the last month of the semester but has failed everything up until then, it’s still not possible for me to evaluate that earlier period in the light of newer information. And that student will probably fail that semester. In addition, all students still have to fulfill the course and curriculum requirements, regardless of the disability.</p>
<p>That’s why it’s really important for students who have a legitimate disability of any type to get registered and to self-disclose as early as possible. Otherwise, we really can’t help them.</p>
<p>As a college Dean of Students, I handle these situations all the time, and it sounds as if NJSue may be in the same field since her advice is right on target. As she said, not all disrupted semesters are candidates for Incompletes. On my campus, an “I” allows the student to have until the end of the next semester to complete the work on their own. That may be a lot more do-able in a class with just required papers than in a foreign language or a class with a lab. And the time in the semester at which the absence occurred has a lot to do with the appropriateness of completing the assigned work.</p>
<p>Here’s how this situation would be handled on my campus - yours may differ, but I’d think it would be somewhat similar. The student would ask the instructors for Is. If there are classes for which an I isn’t appropriate, they’d talk to me about presenting medical documentation to show that their absences were medically-related and beyond their control. If I and the academic dean and registrar approve it, the student could be granted a waiver to the deadline for Withdrawals in order to be given a late “W.” At our college, grades can be changed for up to a semester after the fact, so I would be able to work with a student during the spring semester on getting failing grades for fall changed to Ws, if appropriate.</p>
<p>At my school it is the professors that give the incompletes, though they do have guidelines. For instance the student must have already completed >50% of the classwork and must have greater than a D grade in the work they have done so far. The I does not affect the GPA, but at some later date it reverts to the grade you would have got based on your points to that date. At our school they also put on the transcript what your grade would be if you fail to complete the work within the allotted time (1 year). For instance I have 3 IBs on my current semester transcript due to having to be in Houston with my husband at M D Anderson during finals week. If I don’t ever do the finals, I will end up with Bs in those classes. If I do the finals I will hopefully change those IBs into As. But if I had not already completed a good part of the classwork, I would not be eligible to get the Is in the first place.</p>
<p>It is possible that the student is not eligible for incompletes in some classes if the school has similar guidelines.</p>
<p>At the Us we were considering, all of them did emphasize the importance of registering with the disabilities office & self-IDing with any disability at the beginning of the term & talking/working with the instructor(s)/TAs. They also indicated that while the disabilities office WOULD help as much as it could IF the student needed extra help in working with the instructor but it was the STUDENT’s job to try working with the instructor first.</p>
<p>They also indicated that instructors had considerable discretion on how they would treat prolonged absences, even when due to medically registered disability. Both of our kids have registered & self-ID at the beginning of each term, just in case. So far, they have not needed or received much in the way of accommodations, but we all feel it best to leave the door/option open.</p>
<p>This is a wonderful thread with very useful information and just another example of why I love cc.</p>
<p>Hi everyone. I’m sorry I haven’t been particularly responsive – finals are going on at my school right now. I only have one left in the morning! Yay! (Can’t sleep though.) If you don’t feel like reading a novel, skim through and see if I’m replying to a quote of yours (though my replies to everyone else will provide a lot of relevant context). If I’m not replying to you specifically, it’s because I think something I’m saying to someone else covers what I’d say to you OR because what you said was very helpful but doesn’t really need a specific reply except, “Thank you!” So, thank you. I realize that when I started the thread, I was pretty crabby. I’m like a mama bear when it comes to the people I love. You’ve all been stunningly helpful though, which doesn’t surprise me at all – I’ve been reading the parent forum and caf</p>
<p>A mental illnes can have the added disadvantage of being difficult to diagnose, it can be unexpected(although it isn’t unexpected in this student’s case)and as the previous poster said, easily faked. A “horrible car accident” is generally considered to be unexpected and can easily be documented. In this case, as BPDgirl tells us, this student has a long documented history of illness, yet chose not to register. </p>
<p>As for the Op’s opinion on an F: Could it be the profs see an F as a failure of results, rather than a failure of effort?</p>
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<p>I can see why this would be someone’s assessment of how to handle the situation. It seems odd though considering how most colleges are always professing to do whatever possible to help their students succeed, and having a bunch of F’s that may make you look stupid or lazy (or both) can be, as I said in my last post, quite detrimental to somebody who already has an illness that may cause difficult setbacks in achieving even modest goals. But it is indeed true that she did not register with the disability office at school, and I asked her this morning if she was in a healthy state when she had the chance – she says she was. That certainly doesn’t look very sympathetic.</p>
<p>And after this is settled, however it is settled, BPD’s friend will have a new choice to make next time.
Register as disabled and hope no illegal discrimination comes about, or choose not to register and hope no flare-ups occur. She will have to decide which way is less likely to have problems arise, and factor in that if problems do arise, which way would be less serious problems.</p>