I was recently made aware of a policy for Yale students who are struggling with suicidal thoughts or behaviors. Read about it for yourself so you can make your own opinions, but I found it extremely distressing. In a period of time where so many of us are trying to de-stigmatize mental health and mental illness, this policy makes taking care of your own mental wellness punishable in a way that is truly unfitting and unfair. I want to assume that the administrators who created this policy were not trying to make it more difficult to get support when students are suicidal, but I believe that is ..read more

According to the National Student Clearinghoue Research Center, approximately 2% more students dropped out of college in 2019 than in the previous year, which was the highest drop out rate since 2012. For community college students, that rate was 3.5%. Overall, college drop out rates in 2021 reached 15%. And for many students, the reason for this is grief. Students, especially students with low incomes, have experienced a lot of death over the past few years. When parents die, the burden placed on students is immeasurable: from financial strains, difficulty motivating for school and concentrat ..read more

This week, Inner Harbor will celebrate two years of supporting and educating college students and those that work with them. We have accomplished so much! There truly is so much to celebrate. Starting a new business at the beginning of a global pandemic was scary. But it turns out, this business would be more needed than ever before. The awareness and openness to receiving has been the inspiration that I have needed to keep going when I have struggled being a new business owner. Inner Harbor has supported colleges from New York to California. I have presented, both in person and virtually, up ..read more

With so much focus on the benefits of higher education, and the hard work it took to get there, many students (and their families) are surprised about the not-always-so-smooth transition that they experience as they move to college. The excitement about new friends, interesting courses and independence are often the focus. This often does not allow for the other realities including loneliness, loss of routines, bad food and stressful roommates. And that's just the reality for most incoming, first-year students. Add in a loss, and these challenges are exponentially more difficult. Today, we wil ..read more

By Rachel Markowitz If you’ve been reading these newsletters the past few weeks, you might recognize my name. I’m Rachel, Inner Harbor’s summer intern, and I am a junior in college majoring in English and Public Health. As I am starting to stuff my clothes into those blue Ikea bags and getting ready to move back to school, I wanted to reflect on what I have learned from immersing myself in this type of work.  Questions I received from well-meaning friends and family members when I started writing these blogs were often along the lines of, “Why are you writing about death? You’re young. Is ..read more

By Rachel Markowitz “I can’t afford to die.”  This sounds ridiculous at first. After all, death is universally inevitable. However, between end of life care and funeral costs, death can be a huge expense that most people do not consider until they have to. How can someone navigate the financial aspect of death while processing the grief they are facing, especially if the death was too young or too soon?  According to Forbes.com, the median cost of a funeral and burial in the United States is currently $7,848, and is steadily increasing. Everything from the casket to the funeral home ..read more

By Rachel Markowitz “I mean all I have to say is that I am heartbroken. People keep on saying that it’s naive to say, ‘I didn’t think it would ever happen here,’ but I truly didn’t. You could never understand it if you haven’t had it happen to you…I just feel numb and disconnected.”  That’s what my friend Hannah, a resident of Highland Park Illinois, told me a few weeks after the Highland Park shooting on the Fourth of July. She was not at the parade when the shooting occurred. But the effects of grief she feels for her community are very real.  After the shooting, Hannah reached out ..read more

Reaching out for mental health support is often a very hard choice for anyone to make, let alone college students. Many universities have free counseling services available to help students cope with pressing issues like test anxiety and adjustment issues. Making the decision to utilize these resources is often intimidating, yet worthwhile, but is this support equally accessible to everyone? The JED foundation has recently come out with some alarming statistics: despite having higher rates of suicide and mental health challenges, students of color are two times less likely than white students ..read more

For our previous two Politics of Grief articles, we talked about the experience of being LGBTQ+ in college and the effects of the overturning of Roe v Wade. This next blog is focused on another issue that affects young adults: homelessness.  It may seem random to bring up homelessness in a discussion of the politics of grief, but the experience of homelessness is intertwined with social justice and disproportionately affects marginalized groups, and the experiences that these people face can only be described as grief. How is homelessness associated with social justice? Some people may th ..read more

Rachel Markowitz I don’t think I’ll be able to forget the feeling I had on Friday, June 24th, while I was casually scrolling through my social media feeds. Sitting and clicking through Instagram stories is how I found out that Roe v. Wade was overturned. The constant swirling of news and information is like a tornado. If you are in the middle of a tornado, you are safe for the time being, but you can see everything whirling around outside you. You can only hope that everything will be okay. However, once the storm is over and you step outside to assess the damages, you see the wreckage of bu ..read more