At Yale, a Surge of Activism Forced Changes in Mental Health Policies

For decades, the university required students seeking medical leaves to withdraw and reapply. A campus suicide set off a cascade of revisions.

In the weeks after Rachael Shaw-Rosenbaum, a first-year student at Yale, died by suicide in 2021, a group of strangers began convening on Zoom.

Some of them knew Ms. Shaw-Rosenbaum. But many only knew what she had been going through, as she struggled with suicidal thoughts and weighed the consequences of checking herself into the hospital.

One, a physician in her early 40s, had been told years ago to withdraw from Yale while she was hospitalized after a suicide attempt, an experience she recalls as chillingly impersonal, like youre being processed through this big machine.

Another, a classical pianist in his 20s, withdrew from Yale amid episodes of hypomania and depression, feeling, as he put it, not just excluded but rejected and cut off and forgotten about.

Members of the group, which took the name Elis for Rachael, shared a complaint that Yales strict policies on mental health leaves requiring students to withdraw without a guarantee of readmission, stripping them of health insurance and excluding them from campus had penalized students at their most vulnerable moments.