How Cambridge University almost killed me

For Morwenna Jones, getting into Cambridge was a dream come true. But the stress
took its toll and she fell ill. Here, she reveals how mental health problems are on the
rise at our top universities.
 ‘At one point I didn’t leave my room for two weeks’: Morwenna Jones.
Monday 6 October 2014 

I had always been what they call a good student. In 2011, aged 18, I had two A*s and two As at A-
level, various sporting successes and plenty of friends. I was president of more clubs and societies
than the school needed. I was going to Cambridge University to study English. By most measures,
things were going OK.

There was a problem, however – I had also developed an eating disorder. Over the two years
before I started university, my body fluctuated and metamorphosed constantly. One week I would
be a size zero, and my skeletal form would be found hunched scribbling notes instead of eating
lunch. The next, I would look “normal” and hide the seemingly endless piles of food I would
consume and then bring up again afterwards. Eventually I told my parents, and after six months I
was referred for counselling with the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service. Once a week
I sat in a bleak room and explained to a woman called Lucy that my condition was connected to an
obsessive desire to be the best. She listened politely, told me to keep a food diary and then
discharged me eight weeks before I started university.

Eighteen months later I was in the passenger seat of my parents’ car, the colleges of Cambridge
disappearing into the rain behind me. For a year and a half I had felt completely out of my depth,
and finally cracked. No longer was I thought “talented” or “gifted” because I could work for eight
hours or read an 800-page novel in a day. At Cambridge everyone I knew could do that. I was no
longer special.

I know this might not sound like the world’s worst problem. What did I have to complain about? I
was at a top university, with support – in theory – everywhere I looked. But misery has a way of
finding you in the most unusual places, and for reasons that can seem incomprehensible, not least
to oneself. Inside that bubble, where perfection was the norm, falling short of my own expectations
tormented me. I wasn’t a size eight. I wasn’t on track for a first. I wasn’t a sporting Blue.

I dropped out in January 2013. When my parents collected me, I hadn’t left my room in two weeks.
For two years I had been killing myself in the name of perfection, unable to enjoy being anything
less than the best. As a result I had developed depression alongside severe bulimia.

The fact is that I am by no means unique. Suffering from an eating and depression made me
hardly more special among the Oxbridge student population than the A-levels that got me there.
Last year a survey by student newspaper The Tab revealed that 21% of Cambridge students have
been diagnosed with depression, while a further 25% think they may be depressed. At my all-girls’
college, Murray Edwards, 28% of students have experienced eating disorders. The numbers are
reflected more widely – the National Union of Students surveyed 1,200 students and found that
20% believe they have a mental health problem, while 1 in 10 experience suicidal thoughts.
Welfare teams at Cambridge alone anticipate 50 to 60 suicide attempts per year.
What I have seen in my time at university is an epidemic of students struggling with mental health
difficulties. Every term more students “intermit” – the Cambridge term for taking some time out.
Katt Parkins, a fellow English student in her second year at Churchill College, understands the
burden of expectation well. “It has been affecting me my whole life,” she says, recounting how she
developed an eating disorder when she was just 11 years old. “I’d always either want to do
something perfectly or not do it at all.” She intermitted in February this year, no longer able to cope
with the prospect of a low grade. “I was obsessed with perfection. I think one of the reasons
I intermitted was because I still really wanted to do well and get a high 2:1 or a first,” she says. “If
I’d achieved less, my health would probably have become even worse.”

At Britain’s universities many students crumble as they realise they are only average-sized fish in a
much larger pond. Part of the problem is that while we are used to praising or criticising students, it
is unusual to sympathise with them. Even to themselves, the whining sounds like “poor me”. But
the reality is that the pressure is putting thousands of bright young people at risk of serious mental
illness.

Oxbridge is a close-knit collegiate system. Within this system, small communities of extremely
motivated individuals live together in the intimate confines of an environment characterised by
centuries of academic achievement. Katt Parkins likens it to an Etch-a-Sketch. “You know when
you just have to slide off what’s already there and focus on a new drawing?” she says. “It’s like
that. You have to focus on your work, so you suppress personal things that you should actually
work through. Eventually it builds and builds.”

Students like her are the reason why Oxford academic Nicola Byrom founded the charity Student
Minds five years ago, when she was a graduate student. Having suffered from a mental illness
herself as a teenager, she wanted to provide students with support.

“There’s certainly historical data that suggests that there is greater prevalence of mental health
difficulties in Oxford and Cambridge,” says Byrom. “Living with a small group of competitive people
isn’t easy, and you also then have a competitive environment. I think Oxford and Cambridge are
probably happy to admit that they pre-select people at high risk of developing mental health
difficulties, because they’re taking high-achieving perfectionist young people, who come to be the
best.”

But things could be changing. Judith Carlisle, headteacher of the independent Oxford, has started
a scheme to combat the rise of “unhelpful perfectionism” among her students. It’s called The Death
of Little Miss Perfect. Teaching students that “it’s fine not to get everything right”, the scheme
includes tests that get progressively harder within a time limit, preventing pupils from answering all
of the questions. Its goal, as Carlisle recently stated, is to teach students that “perfectionism is only
captured in a moment” and is “not achievable long term”. As well as encouraging students to
embrace phrases such as “Have a go” and “Nobody’s perfect”, she’s urging them to avoid “going
for something that, if they don’t get it, will destroy them”, and that includes universities. Her advice?
“Don’t aim for Oxford if not getting in will destroy you – or if going will destroy you.”.

The last statement might sound confusing, but it sums up some of the ambivalence I feel about
Cambridge. If my school had offered a similar scheme, perhaps I wouldn’t have wound up taking a
painful, expensive and disruptive year out from university. The pressures of Cambridge broke me
but also gave me a whole new perspective on my academic life. If Carlisle aims to teach pupils that
“real failing is failing to have a go”, then she also needs to teach them to “have a go” at Oxbridge,
and, if necessary, learn from their mistakes.

Byrom is also unconvinced that schools should be warning pupils off Oxbridge altogether. “Schools
ought to be thinking about what environment is going to best support a student to thrive through
their degree,” she explains, drawing on her own experience of completing an undergraduate
course at Nottingham before starting a postgraduate degree at Oxford. “Even for the ‘bad’
perfectionist, Oxbridge could still be a great environment. It’s very difficult to tell someone that a
certain atmosphere isn’t going to be right for him or her.”

Meredith Leston and Elise Morton, at Oxford and Cambridge respectively, also identify with the
challenges and opportunities provided by Oxbridge. “I knew things were bad when I tried to read
my neuroscience textbook and I may as well have been starring at the phonebook,” says Leston,
who is about to enter her second year of experimental psychology. “My passion to learn about the
brain is what got me into Oxford and it’s what I am dedicating my life to. The things that mattered
most to me and defined who I was as a person suddenly barely registered. I felt completely lost.”
Morton agrees. “I remember in the second year just suddenly realising that I was feeling really,
really down but without a cause,” she says. “It was when I actually realised just how good my life
was that I suddenly went: ‘Hang on, why the hell are you feeling like this?’ I took stock of
everything that was good in my life and yet noticed that I was still crying every day. I had to ask
myself why I was doing that. I don’t want to say: ‘Oh it was Cambridge’, but I feel like the intense
stress of a Cambridge degree has to have an impact upon your mental health.”

Despite all this, however, neither of them has any regrets about their choice of university. Morton
graduated this year with a degree in modern and medieval languages. Now studying in Los
Angeles, she is also a part-time mental health activist, campaigning for awareness charity Time to
Change. She says struggling at university helped her gain perspective. “At first it was difficult to
accept that I wasn’t going to be the best. But once I did, I felt able to be more creative and take
more risks.”

These issues are problems across all universities, of course. It’s just that they can seem most
concentrated where the pressure is greatest. “University is a tough time for a lot of people,
whatever university you’re at,” adds Georgina Aisbitt, who works for Student Minds in Oxford.
“Your informal support systems, like friends and family, and your formal support systems, like
therapists and GPs, are left at home. You add pressure from the university to achieve and you’re
putting students in a situation where they are going to be comparing themselves to others. That’s a
pretty hefty combination, and it creates quite a tough environment. It’s important that schools try to
help their students and promote discussions about mental health.”

When I returned to Cambridge in January I was nervous. I felt that I had tamed some of the
anxious, depressed teenager who had struggled before, but would I be able to cope with the
isolation? I took a book out of the library and sat in a café on King’s Parade working on my essay
for that week. I sat in that café for four hours until long after the sun had set and the bikes had
stopped speeding along under King’s College. For the first time since I started Cambridge, I read a
book and enjoyed every page.
Eight months later, the perfectionist in me is dead and I don’t miss her. I was discharged from
mental health services at the end of last year, and I stopped seeing a therapist in June. The eating
disorder will probably always be at the back of my mind, but in many ways it has been a full
recovery. I still have to be careful – I don’t drink to excess or sleep in, and I try to avoid
environments which I know might be tricky. I feel I now have the mental equipment to deal with life.
Excellence is fine, but nobody’s perfect.

If you are struggling with depression or mental health problems, or know someone who is, contact
Student Minds (studentminds.org.uk)
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/oct/06/cambridge-university-student-depression-
eating-disorders