I would highly encourage anyone feeling depressed to seek counseling, and for the most part school mental health services are a safe and welcoming place to find help. With that being said, DO NOT share information about your mental health status with non-medical staff at school, as they are not bound by the same rules as physicians and can act on that information. My (unsubstantiated and hopeful) guess is that this is likely what actually led to this student's dismissal.
It's a terrible loophole that needs to be closed. In the meantime, it seems we can't in good conscience encourage people to use their on-campus counselors for mental health crises. (And the off-campus counselors are going to be more expensive, such that people you warn off the on-campus ones might just get no help at all.) :/
Here's an example of a college administration obtaining therapist records to use in their legal defense, under FERPA after the student sued them: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2015/03/09/391876192/college...
In this day and age, I would be very, very careful about who you talk to about any kind of mental health issues. Get a reference from somebody you know and trust who has received direct care from the professional in question. Preferably more than one and never from a school. Make sure it's someone you pay directly, NOT a school counsellor. I appreciate you wanting depressed people to seek help, but sometimes dealing with it yourself is better than dealing with the system.
In theory yes, in practice it's easy to make something up, here it's mostly "company internal reasons", which they don't have to justify.
The formal reason will never be that someone sucked at their job.
Virginia is no hero for mentally ill people. Some people are homeless and without income because of mental illness, and until this year, the only "medicaid" available for those people (who did not care for children) were sterilization services (see "Plan First" at VA DMAS.) This means that the eugenics program against mentally ill people that Virginia is known for is still ongoing - it's merely only optional now. Virginia has closed the majority of their state mental institutions and leave these cases to be dealt with by the criminal justice system: basically the theory is to let them devolve into criminal activity then send them to prison.
I think that some mental illness is the result of child abuse. Although child abuse and neglect have been statutorily defined as criminal acts, they are not meaningfully prosecuted in practice. Since the mid-1970's, it has been the law that a wide classification of government employees, from school employees to police officers, are bound by law to report any suspicions of child abuse, but in practice none of them do that, and until several years ago, these employees were liable to no criminal penalties for ignoring that law. I have tried to find cases of people prosecuted for violating this, and have found none.
I think that WMU's influence over the state government is ridiculous and the results of it are disgusting. The school does not deserve its stellar reputation. I would not feel the least bit of sorrow if it were dissolved.
http://www.splc.org/blog/splc/2013/04/transparency-tuesday-c...
If so that is crazy..Cheating on a test is not "illegal." There are a whole host of things that are "against school policy" but not illegal.
I find this very hard to believe....
It's a blatant breach of privacy and medical confidentiality. Comparing it to "cheating" is actually fairly despicable. We're not talking about malicious or manipulative behaviour, we're talking about someone suffering from an illness who took action to find treatment.