• 10 Dec, 2025 *

In Yoruba, my mother tongue, we have a saying: “Igi gogoro máa gun mi l’ójú, òkèrè ni a ti nwo,” which roughly translates to, “To prevent a tall and sharp tree from poking one’s eye, one observes it carefully and strategize from afar.” It is a proverb about foresight, preemptive responsibility, and the need to address danger before it grows teeth.

The University of Minnesota’s current approach to supporting students with severe mental health challenges, especially international graduate students, seems to lack this essential foresight. By clinging to a “non-intervention” posture that waits for students to request help themselves, even when they are clearly in altered mental states, the university allows preventable crises to unfold.

The Limits of “Wait Until They Ask”

The University offers a wide array of mental health resources: counseling services, crisis hotlines, online screenings, wellness programs. On paper, this looks like care. In practice, these services depend almost entirely on self-referral, on the assumption that a student in crisis will recognize their need and take the initiative to seek help. Many cannot. The very nature of serious mental health conditions makes reaching out difficult, if not impossible. For international graduate students who already face cultural isolation, academic pressure, financial strain, and immigration uncertainty, this gap is not a minor flaw.

Conditions such as bipolar disorder, major depression, or schizophrenia often impair self-awareness and decision-making. Students in such states may not recognize the severity of their situation, may underestimate their risk, or may actively avoid help because of stigma, fear of documentation, or past experiences of being dismissed. For international students, these obstacles are layered on top of cultural taboos around mental illness, language barriers, and the absence of a local family or community safety net.

Research has repeatedly shown that international students underutilize mental health services compared to their domestic peers, despite equal or higher levels of psychological distress, loneliness, and anxiety. As a result, students might quietly drop out of programs, lose their immigration status, turn to recreational drugs for self-medication, or even drift into housing insecurity and homelessness.

Autonomy Can Quickly Become Abandonment

The University’s non-interventionist stance is often defended using the language of autonomy, individual freedom, and health privacy. These are important principles and I believe that they matter deeply, especially in a society with a long history of coercive psychiatric practices. Yet they must be balanced against the university’s duty of care toward its students, particularly those who are far from home and structurally vulnerable. When the institution retreats into a posture of passive availability, it effectively shifts the entire burden of responsibility onto the very people least equipped to carry it.

This approach also ignores the long-term societal costs of inaction. When a student disappears from a program because of untreated mental illness, for their family, friends and loved ones, it becomes a personal tragedy, a broken research trajectory, lost investment of years of training, funding, and loss of hope for both the student and the institution.

The University of Minnesota has both a moral and institutional responsibility to protect its students from preventable harm. This responsibility is even sharper in the case of international graduate students who often have no nearby family, limited access to non-university support systems, and whose legal status in the country is tightly bound to their academic performance and enrollment. When these students experience severe mental health challenges, delays in recognition and response can trigger a cascade of life-altering consequences: academic suspension, loss of visa status, financial collapse, and forced return to home countries under conditions of deep distress. I have now seen this exact pattern play out a few number of times.

Building a Proactive Duty of Care

Some may argue that universities cannot and should not force treatment on competent adults without consent. That concern is valid. But the choice is not between doing nothing and coercive hospitalization. There is a wide and humane middle ground. For instance, faculty and staff can be systematically trained to recognize early signs of severe mental distress and to know exactly how and where to refer students for evaluation, rather than treating these signs as “personal issues” outside their remit. Mental health professionals can work in close collaboration with academic departments and international student offices to create coordinated care plans, so that academic policies, visa requirements, and clinical needs are not operating at cross-purposes.

The university could identify clearly defined at-risk groups, such as international graduate students on precarious funding or those returning from medical leaves, and build in regular, low-stakes wellness check-ins as an expectation rather than an exception. Finally, crisis intervention policies can be written in a way that explicitly empowers staff to act when a student’s behavior suggests an immediate risk to self or others, with safeguards for dignity, privacy, and due process. None of this requires paternalism. It only requires clarity, training, and the courage to see what is already visible.

I am convinced that a broad adoption of these measures would not only help identify struggling students earlier, it would also gradually shift the campus culture. When proactive outreach and coordinated care are normalized, seeking help becomes less like a confession of failure and more like a routine part of being a student, like meeting with an advisor or attending office hours. For international students in particular, who may come from cultures where mental health is heavily stigmatized or not named at all, the difference between a silent list of services on a website and a human being who checks in, notices changes, and offers a pathway to care can be the difference between survival and collapse.

It is time for the University of Minnesota to reconsider its comfortable, non-interventionist stance. The current approach is failing some of its most vulnerable students, especially those who, because of the very nature of their illness, cannot reliably advocate for themselves. A more proactive and relational model of care would save lives, preserve academic careers, and more honestly reflect the university’s claim to foster a supportive learning environment for all.

Boluwatife OLU Afolabi is a PhD Candidate and the 2024-2026 President, Council of Graduate Students (COGS), University of Minnesota

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