There's an article in yesterday's Boston Globe about MIT saying that its mental health care is inadequate. The article was pretty clearly prompted by several recent, publicized suicides, but it surprised me, as I've been pretty impressed by the MIT mental health options. There are posters all over campus for the crisis hotline, quite a bit of advertising of the other services, and a fairly friendly office. (It's in the main health center, which is huge, and it's sort of set back along a hallway, which is well-marked but tucked away so that you can't see who is sitting in the waiting area. (You can see the waiting areas for other medical specialty areas -- they're just off the main stairwell.)
And, while there is a lot of pressure, I've seen a fairly strong recognition that it exists, and that it's okay to have problems with it. Maybe it's just because I'm a grad student and kinda cut off from campus life, but the general attitude is actually much less masochistic than that at Swarthmore -- where misery poker was the game of choice at the dinner table, but people generally assumed that pressure was *good*.
