Her university expelled her after she attempted suicide, saying she had an ‘inability to self-regulate.’ Now she is fighting back

For Leah, it ended that night in a hospital recovering from a suicide attempt in her hotel room.

A rape survivor with post-traumatic stress disorder, Leah said she had endured weeks of mocking comments from classmates about sexual assault and mental illness. The cruel jokes only intensified on the road trip, she said, and she fell into crisis.

For the next week, the then-20-year-old remained hospitalized, unaware that university officials were planning to expel her from the school for “excessive alcohol consumption and abuse of prescription drugs” in her suicide attempt.

Her actions, the school said in an Oct. 6, 2018, letter, showed “an inability to self-regulate and to take responsibility for (her) actions and the consequences thereof.”

Leah had suddenly lost her housing, student financial aid, academic standing and her career aspirations in international law and diplomacy.

“I went into this program because it was so aligned with what I wanted to do with my life and the career goals I have,” said Leah (the Star has agreed not to use her real name at her request).

“I was essentially told: Now that you’re a rape victim, now that you’re a rape survivor, we don’t want you anymore. You’re broken. You don’t belong here.”

Leah appealed the expulsion, arguing school officials failed to accommodate her mental health needs. When it was rejected, she filed a complaint to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal.

Leah’s case is ongoing, but the outcomes for other students who have turned to the tribunals have been largely one-sided.

A national review of post-secondary student mental health complaints shows steep odds against students’ success, an investigation by the Toronto Star and the Investigative Journalism Bureau has found.

Students with complaints about their school’s response to their mental health accommodation requests typically file appeals first with their academic department. For example, a student may ask a professor to retake a failed exam or submit a late assignment without penalty to avoid academic probation or expulsion. When those requests are denied, the last resort on campus is a complaint to an internal appeals committee, often overseen by the school’s senate or governing council.

If that appeal fails, as many do, a student’s next, and often final, step is to file a human rights complaint to provincial tribunals or commissions.

A review of a dozen human rights complaints across Canada filed by students against their educational institutions alleging failure to accommodate their mental health needs showed all but one were partially or fully dismissed.

Megan Evans Maxwell, a lawyer with Ontario’s Human Rights Legal Support Centre, said the centre frequently gets calls from youth trying to get accommodations for mental health from their schools.

“It’s very hard to bring an application around a mental health case,” she said. “(Students are) already dealing with a crisis. To take on a university in the midst of a crisis, it’s something most can’t do.”

Evans Maxwell is representing Leah in her human rights complaint against Trinity Western University (TWU). The complaint alleges that school officials removed her because of her suicide attempt after failing to provide mental health accommodations she requested.

TWU, an Evangelical Christian university based in Langley, B.C., with a satellite campus in Ottawa where Leah attended classes, denies the allegations in its tribunal submission.

The school said it connected Leah with a counsellor, and she “was offered a process through which she could request and receive accommodation, but declined to utilize it.”

The school also said Leah never informed officials about what she alleged was a poisoned environment on campus. “(The university) denies that there is a ‘rampant rape culture’... and that it permitted or tolerated such,” TWU’s tribunal submissions state.

The submissions say Leah was removed “because of her conduct and behaviour, not because of her disability ... Accommodation of the Applicant’s medical needs were considered but were beyond what TWU could provide.”

They also say Leah was not alone among her classmates in requiring mental health support.

“(TWU) also feared that continuing in the ... program would be harmful to the applicant and to the other students ... three of which also suffered from mental health issues, and one of which was also a victim of past sexual abuse.”

TWU officials declined interview requests, citing privacy restrictions on discussing individual students and the case before the human rights tribunal.

In a written statement, the school said “we are sensitive to, and grieved by, the mental health crisis facing university students across Canada, and we continue to take concrete efforts to address this issue.”

The sequence of events leading to Leah’s suicide attempt echoes the experiences of many young people interviewed across North America and who say their studies were upended by mental health challenges after their requests for accommodations were met with silence.

Leah knew she was vulnerable when she began the TWU program in August 2018. She said she had been sexually assaulted the previous year at another school and suddenly she was facing what she calls insensitive comments about mental health and sexual assault from students at TWU.

She said she asked the school for counselling and if a staff member could check in on her, especially in September and early October, which marked the first anniversary of her sexual assault.

“There were no check-in’s specific to (Leah’s) request for accommodation,” her human rights complaint says.

A school student co-ordinator advised Leah to confront the individual tormenting her, the human rights complaint alleges. Leah said she did. But it only made matters worse.

“Leaving it to be handled by myself, I disclosed personal information which made me feel isolated from my classmates and violated,” the complaint says.

On Sept. 28, 2018, Leah joined classmates on the trip to Quebec City, where she alleges the group engaged in drinking games that mocked sexual assault survivors.

“I felt like I was screaming, ‘Listen, I need help,’ ” she said in an interview. “These jokes aren’t funny, they’re hurtful. I’m drowning here.

“I just wanted out.”

While Leah was still lying in a hospital bed, the school told her she was withdrawn from the program “effective immediately.” She had 72 hours to appeal the decision.

In an appeal written from her hospital bed, she argued the school failed to make accommodations it was legally obliged to provide.

“The premise of my appeal is that the events of September 28th would not have occurred had proper accommodation been made for my disability. I have been continually open and honest about my PTSD, a mental disability, and (TWU) has failed on their duty to accommodate.”

Her lawyer said the school’s appeal process was stacked against her.

“To tell a student who’s suffering through a mental health crisis that you have to file a written appeal in that time — I mean ... as a lawyer it would take me time and I’m not going through a mental health crisis,” said Evans Maxwell. “That barrier alone discriminates against students with mental health disabilities.”

Twelve days after receiving Leah’s appeal — and without interviewing her, she said — TWU vice-president of student life Richard Taylor rejected her appeal. In the Oct. 18, 2018 letter, Taylor cited her “involvement in an incident of excessive alcohol consumption and abuse of prescription drugs, resulting in your hospitalization,” as justification for the initial decision, which was upheld.

The appeal’s rejection letter acknowledges that Leah may have informed school officials about her mental health needs and sought support but said that, “there is reasonable evidence that the staff ... did their best to accommodate your disability and supported you ... Ultimately, the duty of proper self-care is yours.”

She was told if she returned to the residence there would be a police presence. She said school officials told her they changed the locks so she couldn’t return.

While she was still in hospital, all her personal possessions were removed from her room in student housing and, she said, sent to her mother’s home.

Post-secondary institutions do not typically publish data on academic appeals specific to mental health.

The University of Toronto is one of the only schools that publishes the decisions of its appeals committee — the final arbiter of academic matters — which offers a window into the realities of the appeal system.

The school posts the findings to “ensure transparency in academic appeals cases,” said Sandy Welsh, vice-provost of students at the U of T. “We also believe that knowing how a decision-making body has dealt with a matter in the past may be of assistance when preparing for a hearing.”

The reasons behind the secrecy at other schools are mysterious.

“I cannot answer your question as to why there is not currently a precedent database other than that there is not one,” said Kathleen Julien-Michels, governance assistant at Queen’s University.

Calgary’s Mount Royal University spokesperson Peter Glenn said “appeals documentation, whether disciplinary or non-disciplinary, is not part of the public record.”

U of T case files include testimony and judgments but omit the names of the students.

A review of nearly three dozen academic appeals cases filed by students who referenced their mental health as at least one basis of their grievance showed three quarters have failed since the 2000-01 school year.

In a written statement, U of T said the university could not provide a comprehensive assessment of appeal cases in which mental health was a relevant factor because the detailed hearing records are confidential.

“The members of our academic appeals committee have compassion for and strong awareness of mental health disorders in students,” reads the statement. “There could be instances, however, where the academic appeals committee determines that a student’s mental health symptoms had no relevance to the ... decision that is under appeal.”

A 2017 decision details the case of an engineering student who reported experiencing a panic attack in the middle of a final-year exam — a symptom of a diagnosed anxiety disorder. The student failed the exam. A second attack, three days later, resulted in a trip to the hospital.

His doctor concluded the second attack stemmed from “significant personal stressors” and resulted in “a ‘Serious’ degree of incapacitation on academic functioning,” something that was “entirely plausible” to have affected him “beyond the time period around” his time in hospital.

That week, the student learned that his uncle had been killed in a traffic accident — the second close family member to die that year.

The student ultimately failed the semester. He appealed the grades the following July, asking for the ability to withdraw late from the four courses without academic penalty.

The school’s Committee on Examinations dismissed the petition, signalling an end to four years of study that wouldn’t come with a degree. When he appealed again to the university’s Academic Appeals Committee, the committee rejected his appeal, saying the case did not justify the “extraordinary remedy” the student was seeking.

“Had the student promptly brought this event to the attention of the faculty and documented its effect on him,” the case report says, “it is quite possible that the Faculty would have provided some accommodation, or granted a request for late withdrawal without penalty. But the student chose instead to continue with his courses.”

The university declined to comment on the case for reasons of privacy.

Jennifer Fehr, a staff lawyer at U of T’s Downtown Legal Services who represented the engineering student, said the bar for success in academic appeals is high, requiring complainants to prove their performances were impacted by their mental health.

“It can be hard to get those documents because sometimes students aren’t fully aware of what it is that they’re experiencing when they’re experiencing it. Oftentimes, they wait too long...They think that they can push through it, and it turns out that they really can’t,” said Fehr.

Santa Ono, president of the University of British Columbia, said there is a tension between traditional views on academic standards and an emerging recognition of the need for greater flexibility in supporting students with mental health needs.

“I have seen that kind of tension (involving) faculty members ... who grew up at a different time and didn’t have these kinds of supports in place,” Ono said. “The student voice has moved the perspective of this institution in the direction where I think it needs to be.”

Universities across Canada are expected to provide services to students according to provincial human rights codes. When appeals to college or university administrators fail, the only feasible remaining option for most is a human rights complaint to provincial tribunals or commissions.

In their complaints, students typically seek reinstatement into a program, mental health accommodations previously refused by the university or, in some cases, financial remedies.

The first hurdle is filing the complaint on time.

In most provinces, applicants are required to submit a complaint no later than a year after the time of the alleged incident in order to proceed to a hearing.

Daniel Tucker-Simmons, a human rights lawyer in Ottawa, said the limitation period is a “hard deadline” and that, if missed, it is “virtually certain” for the human rights tribunal to dismiss a case.

For young people suffering with mental health challenges who suddenly face the upheaval of serious academic penalties or possible removal from their program and housing, that timeline can be a deterrent.

Many young people bringing forward complaints end up doing it without a lawyer, which Tucker-Simmons said puts them “at a massive disadvantage.”

“The amount of money that you can get (awarded by tribunals and commissions) is not significant enough to justify hiring a lawyer,” he said.

Of the dozen tribunal cases reviewed by this investigation, eight involved self-represented complainants. In all of those cases, the complaints were dismissed. Among the remaining four students with lawyers, one successfully received remedies from the tribunal.

With the help of her lawyer, Leah decided to bring her complaint forward, not because she wants to be reinstated in her program at TWU. She wants to bring awareness and change at the school in order to help future students in her position, she said.

“One option is this isn’t a world I want to live in, I can kill myself. The other option is, I can make this a world I want to live in. And for me, that meant making a legal case out of what had happened to me, setting legal precedent, bringing awareness, changing the world.”

Robert Cribb is a Toronto-based investigative reporter for the Star. Reach him via email: rcribb@thestar.ca

With files from Subi Anandarajah and Menna Elnaka/Ryerson School of Journalism

This series examining youth mental health is part of a cross-border investigation involving the Toronto Star, the Investigative Journalism Bureau (University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health), NBC News, the National Observer and journalism faculty and students from the following universities: Stanford University, Temple University, University of Missouri, Syracuse University, City University of New York, University of British Columbia, Ryerson University, Carleton University and the University of King’s College. See the full list of contributors here.