Last year, as the excitement of my freshman year ensued in matching clear drawstrings, with booths on Sproul Plaza piled with free Cal paraphernalia, I missed out on a quintessential experience of welcome week: I did not go to a single frat party. Where I might have found freshmen dancing bid-free, drinking and making out with strangers, the handcuffs of my OCD prevented me from even stepping foot on frat row.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, is a mental illness that has stalked me since childhood, injecting me with intrusive thoughts about my parents getting into car accidents, my magnetic ability to attract airborne diseases and how I am an inherently “bad” person. To fight these thoughts, OCD has transformed me into a sort of vigilante, combating my intrusive thoughts through repeated actions, thoughts and monotone recitation of phrases under my breath.
While my floormates and I prepared to hike up to the frats, I was overwhelmed by the notion of brushing up against sweaty people and sharing drinks with strangers in a room without ventilation — the frats merging into a cesspool of frat flu and STDs through my OCD-clouded lens.
“I don’t want to go anymore,” I quickly said, suddenly too aware of my unwashed hands and the crowd of freshmen heading to frat row, beleaguering us. “You guys can go ahead.”
Exaggerated sighs and grumbles about how I was “letting them down,” “no fun and ” a “party pooper” met my abrupt backtracking.
“You’re not going to get sick,” they said, trying to reassure me, knowing my germaphobic history. But OCD is not logical: My nauseating desire to slap on a medical mask and stash disinfecting wipes in my bags is not so much a preventative measure as it is a compulsive one — actions accompanying my repetitive mental chanting, attempting to alleviate the nagging grip of my intrusive fear of getting sick.
When they got back, they greeted me with snarky remarks and a well-spun lie about how much fun they had without me.
At UC Berkeley, competitive productivity has romanticized mental health disorders, casting serious disorders as quippy punchlines and casual conversation points to accentuate the performance of constant labor and output production. Students are quick to rant about their ADHD-like attention spans or assignment-induced suicidal ideations, flaunting the struggles of mental illnesses as personality accessories that perpetuate the facade of productivity. In lecture halls, libraries and casual lunches on Telegraph Avenue, mental health struggles become a competition of who is most depressed, who pulled the most all-nighters and who has the shortest attention span.
The casual discussion around mental illnesses has not destigmatized mental health struggles; rather, it generalizes mental illness as a broad battle experienced by all, creating an aesthetic expectation that dilutes the severity of mental illnesses. When everyone is fighting to claim a mental health struggle, those who actually suffer from mental illnesses are evaluated on the same scale as those who dole out mental illnesses as quirky personality traits and fast grabs at laughs.
“Everyone is a little OCD,” until my inability to go out turned a character quirk my floormates and I bonded over into an unaesthetic inconvenience. Where my dorm friends and I once joked about our shared germaphobia, the unconventional manifestation of my OCD led to them taunting me with their shoes brushing against my clean pajamas and laughing at the gloves I wore to clean my shower caddy.
According to UC Berkeley’s Fall 2025 Student Pulse Survey, only 23% of undergraduate and graduate students self-reported anxiety, and 14% self-reported depression. Yet few UC Berkeley students refrain from cracking a joke about killing themselves or their plaguing social anxiety.
When my OCD is evaluated against my friends whose preferences for cleanliness can be circumvented when inconvenient, my OCD flare-ups and anxiety-ridden insistence on cleanliness are suddenly dramatic and illegitimate.
It is this shallow generalization of psychological struggles that encourages mockery of other symptoms of mental illnesses and discourages students from seeking treatment when they actually need it. Though UC Berkeley’s Tang Center provides free mental health support to students with and without the university insurance plan, its utilization leads to mockery and degradation, shrouding these mental health resources in stigma and making the act of seeking mental health support one of shame and embarrassment.
While it is the responsibility of institutions such as UC Berkeley to make mental health care an accessible resource for students, it is up to us to ensure the language we use when referring to these resources permits accessibility. Not only should we refrain from cracking jokes surrounding the idea of “getting help” and the Tang Center, but we should also refrain from pressuring individuals with psychological illnesses to “fix” their disorders.
“Fixed” insinuates that there is something wrong that needs to be corrected or even pitied — a black and white implication that shames the simple fact of possessing a mental illness. The idea that mental health struggles need to be “fixed” also negates the nuances in healing, a process of learning how to live with symptoms rather than completely eradicating them.
The pressure to quickly “fix” a mental illness also negates the long journey of healing necessary to obtain a high quality of life living with these mental struggles — a pressure that implies failure when someone is unable to “conquer” their mental illness on a timeline.
Individuals facing mental health adversities can only seek the treatment they need when we treat mental illnesses as seriously as they are. Treating psychological hardships earnestly does not mean ushering people into treatment or showering them in condolences. It means we stop making and laughing at jokes using mental illnesses as punchlines, and we stop idolizing mental health struggles as personality quirks.
The power to destigmatize mental health lies in our language and attitudes. Therefore, it is our duty to replace ignorance with an acknowledgement of mental health struggles that stems from respect.