Unjustifiably suspended for my mental health in Cambridge: a look back at the past 18 months

11/04/2020 – Dear Clare

Dear Clare,

I remember the first time I walked through the gates of Old Court. It was July. The sun, and its radiance, seemed to fill the sky and create feelings of warmth and hope. The Avenue was lined with flowers and filled with smiles and laughs. Honestly, it seemed perfect. When I eventually started my time with you Clare, it still seemed perfect. The sun was still radiant and glistened off the new scaffolding creating a different, but still perfect atmosphere. It seemed so right.

Clare, over the first term I began to question whether you were as perfect as you seemed. Your food was questionable, your staff sometimes abrupt and I got stopped significantly more than my white peers. However, I ignored this. I put on my rose-tinted glasses and continued to see you in the perfect light of when we first met. I convinced myself I’m at Cambridge, micro-aggressions are just a minor flaw and the inability to make the disability adjustments I needed would get sorted eventually.

But Clare, this wasn’t to last.

In my second term you ripped off my rose-tinted glasses and smashed them into infinitely small pieces. You managed to turn my ‘perfect’ dream into a living nightmare. You’ve locked me out of your gates. You’ve basically banned me from the place I loved and the people I adore. Now, I understand that you may have a poor knowledge of mental health and disability, but I thought you’d at least know enough that your actions wouldn’t be so discriminatory. Clare, you’re filled with such academic and investigative minds that I thought you, at the very least, would get additional evidence when the validity, reliability and accuracy of the evidence you have is proved to be highly questionable. I at least thought that you’d be able to recognise when provocative and stigmatic language is used or when a generalisation is far too large to make.

However, Clare, what I can’t forgive is your endorsement of such awful evidence and your so-called ‘first-rate professional’. I don’t understand why you helped trap me in a cage with bars of proven stigma and lies. I don’t understand how you could allow me to be cast aside with a stamp bearing ‘impossible’. You endorsed someone calling me impossible. You’ve helped reinforce years, decades, maybe centuries of stigma and prejudice. It seems in your eyes that my mental health, of which I was and am coping with well, means that I should be locked up in an asylum with the key thrown away.

Now, I know you’ve said you’ll take me back once I’ve met your ‘criteria’, but frankly, Clare, I’ve already exceeded your criteria and provided you with the proof. Yet here I am, cast aside like rubbish with no way of unlocking your gates and facing your foreboding exterior.

And Clare, even if I do return, it won’t be the same. Though the sun may be still be radiant, and the flowers will bloom, they’ll pale in significance to the uncaring, hostile, uncompassionate aura you exude.

So, Clare, please look after your remaining students well as they deserve much better than you.

Your Sincerely,

Me.

P.S. your inability to celebrate, or at least recognise, equality is very obvious. You might want to do something about that.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5