Have you ever written your own epitaph? It’s fun, in a ghoulish sort of way. “Here lies Jane Smith, flautist and gadabout.” I came up with mine this morning: “Here lies Tom Rector, author and technophobe.” I like to imagine it will be carved into the limestone by a laser mounted on a robot arm and planted somewhere shaded at the close of day by a skyscraper. Dramatic irony, in more ways than one.

Technology is helpful, though, especially when you’re a sentimental old buffoon like me. I followed the ‘Our Grade, Our Choice’ campaign from afar, and the spectre of mental health was always hovering in the background. Campaigners hinted darkly that the high-pressure environment of Cambridge contributes to suffering – which it unquestionably does – and that accordingly removing the class lists will help vulnerable people. This was not my experience, and nor was any atmosphere of bullying or shaming.

When I was at Cambridge, about a hundred years ago – oh, alright, two – my friends and I agreed that we wouldn’t look up our results on the internet, but would instead go to Senate House. This came partially out of that aversion to technology that will be helpful when Skynet achieves sentience, but also out of a commitment to the ritual of exam results. We were all in this together, and I was damned if I was going to get my results online, on my own. Later – when I did a bit better than I had expected – my abiding memory of results day is my best friend hugging me tight, telling me as I shook with relief that he knew I could do it all along.

After I graduated, I fell very quickly into suicidal depression, an illness which has haunted me from time to time since my early teens but took hold in the aimless melancholia of life after Cambridge. In a new town, a new place, I felt myself slipping away from everything I’d known and lashing out against those which remained. For about six months, I woke most days existentially despondent, struggling to get out of bed, go to work and function. This is the daily reality of depression: not unremitting sadness, but inactivity and apathy. Socially, one withdraws, but the lie of depression is that being left alone will help. It never does.

While I have every sympathy with the reaction to class lists being a fear of shaming and a fear of exacerbating depression, I have no recollection of anything like that ever happening on any of my three results days. On the contrary, those who underperformed were always supported and helped (usually with irresponsible quantities of alcohol on the day). Part of the way we did this was through our collective realisation that the Tripos system, while hugely valuable in some ways, also can be arbitrary and can punish people who had a bad day. Any shame is internal.

People who are vulnerable would never have gone to Senate House anyway, because people suffering from grave mental illness are usually too frightened to go out in public where they could be judged in the first place. In the past, those people could have been noted by their absence and marked solitude on a day of intense group emotion, and their friends could check up on them. But if the class lists are removed from public display, this normalises the individual experience and the atomisation of our response to collective stress. Instead of all experiencing it together, supporting each other, protecting the vulnerable and condemning displays of rampant triumphalism, we will each suffer alone, quietly, behind closed doors. My friend’s hug, the feel of his shirt against my face as I held back tears from the wave of pride: that memory was a reminder that I really could do it, I really could work and produce results no matter how thoroughly the black dog cocked his leg and pissed all over my dreams. Seeing the pixels on CamSIS just isn’t the same: our emotions stay internal, they are not sublimated and shared with others, and it becomes harder to form the lasting, exceptional memories which we take to the grave. There is no substitution for rituals like these.

There are ways around this. At some universities, the results are displayed in public but anonymously, identified by numerical keys, so we experience the joys and sorrows together without any potential for gossip. The removal of collective results entirely, however, is another step towards making the Cambridge experience lonelier, sadder and altogether greyer. For people whose lives are already lived in shades of grey, this is unhealthy. It is the ‘leave me alone’ of depression writ large, a cry of a wounded creature who has to be helped even if their disturbed present mind rejects it. The same friend who hugged me on results day also held me as I sobbed into his shoulder some months later, refusing to let the depression take over, guiding me firmly towards treatment and giving me the tools with which I could begin rebuilding my life.

Cambridge can be a solitary place, especially for people with mental health difficulties. The solution cannot be to encourage and normalise loneliness through technology. At our moments of greatest stress, when exams can rip us apart from one another, Regent House should be preserving the institutions and rituals which reform our social bonds, even if they seem unpleasant or unusual in the abstract. Depression can never be indulged – it must be fought. Group bonding is our greatest weapon against it. If it passes away entirely, if this valuable experience is taken away, we will have lost something very precious indeed.