People First Radio – November 07, 2024People First Radio – November 07, 2024
People First Radio
Olúṣèyí Ṣẹ́gun shares contrasting experiences in two graduate programmes while living with serious mental illness, highlighting the difference institutional support can make. She also discusses PTSD work with veterans, medication side effects, stigma, and why choosing health over performance has become her guiding principle.
0:00•8 Nov 2024
A Tale of Two Grad Schools: Mental Illness, Support, and Finding Where You’re Watered
Episode Overview
- One hostile academic environment can be replaced by another that genuinely supports psychiatric disability; there is "a space for you" even if one programme rejects you.
- Taking time out, including a year-long leave, can be both traumatic and life-saving, allowing real rest, peer connection and honest recognition of how unwell you are.
- Accommodations are a right, not an unfair advantage, yet complex paperwork and stigma often stop students from using them.
- Antipsychotic medications can be very effective but may cause serious side effects; open discussion with clinicians and informed choice are crucial.
- Social media is no substitute for qualified care; self-diagnosis trends and misinformation can be harmful, while lived experience and professional support need to work together.
“Choose your health. It’s easier said than done, but choose your health.”
Curious about how others manage their studies while living with serious mental health issues? This episode of People First Radio shares a powerful "tale of two grad schools" through the voice of Philadelphia social worker and Columbia doctoral candidate, Olúṣèyí Ṣẹ́gun (also introduced as Alusha Ishaigu). She walks through the first programme where, just weeks into her master’s, she became so unwell that friends, a therapist and a psychiatrist all urged hospitalisation.
After a positive suicide screen, she recalls being given two stark options: "You can voluntarily go or you can get involuntarily hospitalised." A year-long leave from that university was both traumatic and life-saving, yet attempts to return meant endless paperwork, requests for treatment notes, and a ban on even entering the social work building.
The pressure pushed her towards suicidal thoughts again, prompting her to withdraw and write to the dean warning, "if you all don't address treatment for students with mental disorders, you're going to haemorrhage talent." By contrast, reapplying to Columbia brought a campus where she could be honest about symptoms, treated her condition as a disability, and met professors who "really worked with me" when suicidal thoughts returned. Her message to other students? "Choose your health.
It’s easier said than done, but choose your health." Olúṣèyí also talks candidly about working with veterans with PTSD, misdiagnosis, and the brutal side effects of antipsychotic medication, from 71 pounds of weight gain to unexpected lactation. She stresses self-determination in treatment decisions, warns against using TikTok as a diagnostic tool, and champions person-first language rather than defining people by their diagnosis.
If you’ve ever felt like higher education wasn’t built for your brain, this conversation might help you ask: is the problem me, or the environment—and where might you actually be "watered"?
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