It’s funny (well, not really funny at all, but let’s go with that) how much the fate of my mental health last year wasn’t in my own hands. The person who had quite a large sway over my health and happiness wasn’t a family member, doctor, friend or partner. Instead, it was someone I met with every week for about an hour, always in their office, always at roughly the same time on a Wednesday.

To my admittedly imperfect mind, there are many similarities between a course with a counsellor and a term with a supervisor. A good meeting can make you feel hopeful, maybe even elated – a bad one can leave you fragile and dreading next week’s instalment. The subject matter of my meetings with my supervisors has been, admittedly, quite different, but not too far gone. Though we rarely discuss my fraught relationship with men, it can occasionally rear its bulbous head. My frustration with the portrayal of the phallus in Donne’s poetry, for example, may have grounding in my personal rather than literary pursuits. But, most of the time, we focus on the placement of a comma or the turmoil evoked by this week’s practical criticism. Why did the poet choose blue curtains? Was he… sad?

At the end of last year, I wasn’t doing very well. Between my need to shoehorn Sartre into everything I wrote (what can I say? We depressives are very existential) and my DoS’s critique of my paragraphing, I grew comfortable enough to admit to him that my head felt like it was rotting and I could no longer concentrate for longer than five minutes. The fateful meeting came one morning in Easter Term when, after breaking down in the doctor’s office, I snivelled my way up the ancient wooden stairs and explained that I was rubbish and that was why my work was rubbish and it was all rubbish.

And what happened next, I feel, needs to be recorded in the annals of Bede’s Great History of Mental Health at Cambridge. Dear reader, he understood. He asked if I wanted to go home while I adjusted to my anti-depressants. He said I could do as much or as little work as I wanted, until I felt healthy again. When I mentioned intermitting, he didn’t push the idea aside, nor did he push me into it. He didn’t treat me like I had a nasty rash and must be kept away from other students, nor did he imply that my problems weren’t serious enough to merit time off. My DoS was (and remains) the most perfect, shining example of how understanding Cambridge academics can be.

I know I’m lucky, because I’m still here, plodding around the Sidgwick Site. If my DoS had been anything less than extraordinarily understanding, I don’t know where I might have ended up this year. Maybe exactly where I am now, maybe at home, having either been forced to intermit or having dropped out of university entirely. Yes, I know that’s melodramatic, and particularly melodramatic because ‘oh my god, you can’t drop out of Cambridge!’, but my sensitivity to images of springtime in the pastoral is only matched by my sensitivity in life in general. I cry a lot.

I know I’m lucky, because I can talk about it in this column. So many people I have spoken to over the past two years have quietly struggled with their mental health, handing in essays late or unfinished and receiving nothing but a withering look and a request that they ‘buck up their attitude if they want to be at a top university’. Many supervisors are of a generation that took ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ to heart and genuinely believe that a bit of fresh air and a five-minute session with the college nurse will have you ship-shape and ready to do worksheets. I’ve spoken to students who’ve been told that they do too much extra-curricular stuff, they don’t work hard enough, they’re attention-seeking – anything and everything except that the student in front of them is unwell and that, however eager they are to learn and do the degree they’re paying for, they simply can’t right now.

If that had been my situation, I’d be writing anonymously to avoid repercussions within and outside my college. I’d be scared to say something. Maybe I’d have taken their comments to heart and genuinely believed I didn’t deserve help or a little consideration. Maybe it’s just me, but when I’m feeling low I don’t fancy getting into a brawl with ‘the system’, however archaic, ridiculous and awful it may be.

But it isn’t fair that this is the case. Someone at one college should be guaranteed similar treatment to someone at another. There are some absolutely wonderful, caring, understanding supervisors and Directors of Studies out there, but the university as a whole needs to do more in making treatment of mental health transparent and fair across colleges. Insist that all Directors of Studies attend workshops at the Disability Resource Centre; have clear, updated guidelines on intermission available to all students – and don’t tell me that supervisors are there to ‘teach’ and not to care.