nothin GESO Marches For Mao | New Haven Independent

GESO Marches For Mao

Markeshia Ricks Photo

Demonstrators spotlighted Yale’s mental-health system.

An international student’s dismissal after a hospitalization took center stage Tuesday night at the latest rally by supporters of a drive to unionize the Yale’s graduate-student teachers.

More than 100 students and union organizers gathered in front of the Yale School of Management Tuesday evening to demand that the university administration recognize the Graduate Employees & Students Organization (GESO-UNITE HERE). They also demanded that the university reinstate international student, Grant Mao (pictured above), and address what they see as its failure to deal properly with mental illness on campus.

The union organizers delivered a petition with more than 1,000 signatures, including 250 from Chinese nationals, supporting the call for Mao’s return to the Yale School of Management.

Inspired by successes by graduate-student instructors at New York University and the University of Connecticut, Yale’s decades-old GESO drive has gained new momentum as part of broader labor activism on campus leading up to next year’s expiration of contracts for blue-collar and office workers. Yale’s mental-health services have emerged as a central issue not only for workers, but for students.

GESO-UNITE HERE

Grant Mao addresses supporters at rally.

Mao, originally from China, was expelled from the university in April on academic grounds. Mao said that during his first year at Yale, not only did he suffer from culture shock and language difficulties, but he experienced further stress over a broken engagement and his mother’s heart attack. He fell into a severe depression and had to be hospitalized for six days.

He said his depression caused him to miss the minimum academic performance by a half credit. He appealed the expulsion, providing documentation from his doctor. A Faculty Review Board of the School of Management denied his request to return to school. Not only did the expulsion take effect immediately; he lost his health insurance and without a valid student visa was told to leave the country within 15 days.

Yale refuses to deal with people who are depressed,” Mao said. I shouldn’t have to fight for Yale to respect me.”

Other graduate-student teachers said Tuesday night that even if Mao were still a student and had access to mental health care, he would find an under-resourced system that has long waits and session caps, lacks a diversity of choice and limits the opportunity to get the best, most appropriate care.

Alyssa Battistoni (pictured), a fourth-year political science student, said she started therapy at Yale Health after struggling with anxiety and depression that was exacerbated by the stress of gender dynamics within the graduate school environment.”

Battistoni was initially assigned a male therapist. After a few sessions she realized she would prefer a female therapist. She said it took months for that reassignment to happen. Now that she has a therapist she considers appropriate, she said, she has run up against a limit to the number of times she can see her.

Developing a good relationship with my therapist and a consistent therapy routine has been very helpful, but it has been a slow process, and it’s been frustrating for this care to be repeatedly interrupted by the session cap,” she said. Yale claims that there is no cap, but this is not consistent with my experience. My therapist has been very clear about notifying me how many sessions I had left. This year, my allotted sessions ran out a few weeks before the end of the fall semester.”

Unless she pays out of pocket, Battistoni said that she will not be able to meet with her therapist again before the next school year starts.

Therapy should be a preventive resource rather than a crisis response — something that graduate students can access regularly when they need it,” she said. Students should be able to make decisions about their treatment and progress in conjunction according to an arbitrary limit.”

Shawn Ta (pictured), a fourth-year East Asian language and literature student, said though he has been receiving some form of mental health treatment since he was in high school, he was stunned by the inefficiency of Yale’s response to his condition. He said it took him three months to be assigned a therapist, and when he requested treatment for a psychiatric disorder, his Yale assigned psychiatrist blew him off. He ended up paying $200 of his own money to see a psychiatrist at Yale-New Haven Hospital because insurance coverage for graduate students didn’t cover his evaluation.

I have now been formally diagnosed and have exhausted the services available via the short-term therapy program,” Ta said. I have been waiting over two months to be transferred to the long-term treatment program; I’ve been told that I probably won’t get assigned to a psychiatrist in residency until after the holidays.”

Ta said he wants a union that can negotiate better insurance coverage for graduate student employees.

In an emailed statement, Yale spokesman Thomas Conroy pointed out that the university provides comprehensive health care, including mental health care” to its graduate students for free, which very schools in the nation match.”

Though federal law and university policy prevented him from providing further information about Mao’s expulsion, Conroy said, he stated that it did not derive from a medical condition.

The university administration also has not changed it’s position on recognizing GESO as a union.

Yale does not believe a union of graduates students would be in the best interest of the students or higher education as it would change the flexible teacher-student relationship to a manager-employee model,” Conroy stated in the email. ” The students now have an effective voice through the Graduate Student Assembly, the elected body of graduate students. Yale listens to all its students — undergraduate, graduate and in the professional schools — about their needs, including those needs related to mental health and counseling.Yale constantly evaluates the health services it provides to students, including mental health services, and is always considering ways those services might be improved.”

GESO- UNITE HERE Chair Aaron Greenberg (pictured), who also is a Ph.D. candidate in Yale’s political science department and a member of the Board of Alders, said that organizers aren’t going to give up the fight.

We will not stop fighting about this, our mental health care access,” he said. We will not stop fighting until we win our union. We deserve the mental health care that we need to do the work that we came here to do — the work that we love. And we will be fighting until we win it. We will be back.”

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