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manic-depressive illness. For students who are depressed or who have other mental illnesses, the contrast between how they feel and the energy and high spirits they observe in their fellow students is razor-sharp.
    Colleges and universities are incapable of handling the number of students with psychiatric disorders. Usually, administrative awareness of the problem is short-lived and ineffectual, stirred only by campus violence or the suicide of a student. Once the immediate crisis is past, there is little of a constructive nature put into place. On every campus at which I have spoken, students described to me not only the pain and the hopelessness they felt from their psychiatric illnesses, but also the lack of understanding they felt from their professors and college administrators; the lack of adequate health insurance; their fears about being asked to go on medical leave and not being allowed to return to campus; and how aware they are that their behavior is frightening and disruptive to their roommates (and the guilt they feel and are made to feel as a result of this). Always, I am struck by how far-reaching depression’s presence is: a secretary or a department chairman; a football player; the university president or a trustee; a music student, a premed; a business student in suit and tie—anyone might be affected.
    When I talk to students, so many of whom have tried to kill themselves, I usually ask them, Did you talk with your parents about this? Few say they have. They invariably ask me, Do you worry about getting sick again? How have you stayed well?, and I tell them, Yes, of course I worry. I worry every day. But it is good to worry. I tell them that it is hard to get well and that it is hard to stay well, but that it can be done. I find myself using Richard’s words: Take your medication. Learn about your illness. Question your doctor. Watch your sleep. Use common sense about recreational drugs and alcohol. Reach out to others. I tell them that bipolar illness is a bad illness to get, but that now is a great time to get it. Science is moving fast, and public understanding is better than it has ever been; they are lucky to have been diagnosed and treated early.
    I have been deeply touched by the courage of these students, struggling as they do to study and to compete, to love, and to stay alive. I admire how they have played the hard, unpredictable cards they have been dealt. They take less for granted and appreciate life more than do so many others of their age. I have enjoyed and learned from my time talking with these students over meals, in seminars, after lectures and before. There is a magic in being trusted with the stories of their lives, and if I had nothing but those days and evenings in their company, I would rest content and have little qualm about having made public my private nightmares and weaknesses.
    Students have reached out to me and to their fellow students with generosity and ideas. Medical students at the University of California, San Francisco, for instance, who themselves suffer from depression or bipolar illness, set up a support group for other medical students and house staff with similar problems. To my great pleasure they named their group the Redfield Club and asked me to give a lecture in memory of a popular professor of anatomy who had taken his own life. After my talk, they presented me with a first-edition copy of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies . It was a profoundly thoughtful gift and, by no coincidence, contained several poems I had used in teaching over the years. “My mind’s not right,” Lowell had written in one of them. “I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, / as if my hand were at its throat… / I myself am hell.” I keep the book from the medical students on my desk, reminded of Lowell’s hell and theirs. I am reminded even more of the good that some can seize from pain.
    Most of my discussions have been with undergraduate, graduate, or medical students,