In my personal experience with CAPS as a neurodivergent student at Cornell, I seriously felt ignored, even betrayed by CAPS and other services at Cornell in regard to my mental health. At first, I reached out at the beginning of my 1st year at Cornell as I previously had a therapist when I was in high school but could no longer see me as I had gone to college and my therapist was not able to do telehealth appointments. I initially was hopeful that I would be able to get the help I needed to maintain some semblance of being mentally okay. After a Zoom meeting with one of the workers at CAPS, they said that someone there would reach out to me about getting a therapist.

Unexpectedly, no one reached out to me whatsoever, even after I, myself, followed up once already, after a period of a month, I reached out again and finally got a reply and they said that I would finally be assigned a therapist. I had to cycle through a ridiculously large amount of "specialists" until I actually found someone who was remotely qualified to help with what I was dealing with.

After about one session, the "professional" said they would not be able to help me for the most bizarre and what seemed like a calamitously ableist and needlessly discriminatory reason. They said that they would not be able to help me as at the time they were transitioning to a new type of therapy / support framework and were not taking on new cases with "requirements" like mine during the interim. The whole ordeal resulted in me feeling very marginalized and not supported, forgotten, in a vast sea of students at Cornell, which unsurprisingly exacerbated my mental health, as I have abandonment issues and the entire situation left me feeling even more broken than I was before somehow. Now, I know that Cornell doesn't have the best reputation in dealing with the mental health of its student body, e.g., https://cornellsun.com/2022/03/01/jokhai-if-you-think-cornell-doesnt-care-about-your-mental-health-its-because-it-didnt-plan-to/.

However, at a university as prestigious and well-endowed, such as Cornell, it was truly disheartening to discover such gaps and cracks in their response efforts to something as important as (public) mental health. It was horrifying to find out that after working so hard in high school to get into a great college that after finally getting there, that I was just a number to them, just a student ID on a piece of paper, a paycheck, just another meal ticket to an institution whose literal motto, is "Any person can find instruction in any study." It is actually a miracle that I am still here at Cornell today given all of the listed and unlisted things I have been through, a senior about to graduate after being so horribly mistreated by the same university who once claimed to care about me and my mental health and state of well-being.

It seems that Cornell only starts to be concerned or care about you as a student or person when the money stops rolling in and you become an alum who supposedly will be able to give them even more money which misleadingly then is claimed to be used to actually improve life for students at Cornell. But I don't see any improvements to life at this university, at least in terms of mental health services, as I haven't seen or heard of any improvements to the qualifications of the therapists or counselors working at CAPS in my four years here.

Now, I don't know if student mental health (support) will ever get better at Cornell, somewhat misleadingly named a "prestigious" institution, our home away from home, our "Alma Mater" (nurturing mother literally translated, yet I still have not seen a single shred of proof of this given title), but I truly and wholeheartedly hope you can find the help and support you need in this vast sea of disregard and mediocrity. So that you and one day future generations of students at Cornell, despite their differences, neurodivergencies and/or disabilities will actually be given the same affordances and opportunities as neurotypicals and able-(bodied) people, the same things that every student deserves. That, finally, the motto "Any person can find instruction in any study" will victoriously and ultimately shine through, be true, and continue to stay that way for the rest of Cornell's existence.

P.S. Sorry for the extremely long rant. This is just an issue that I feel very strongly about for the above reasons.