Article in Campus Newspaper about Clubmood
Since I was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder when I was in my junior year in college, I felt very strongly about the need to have a student organization on campus for students with bipolar disorder. A dear friend (also a bipolar student) and myself tried to convince the campus departments to sponsor a student group for people with affective disorders. We wanted the group to be self directing and wanted to be able to meet somewhere on campus. The "Disability Resource Center" refered us to the counseling center who told us they could try to setup some group counseling.
This was very disappointing as we knew that people with other disabilities met on a regular basis in the conference room of the Disability Resource Center. Why weren't we given the same access to the conference room? We didn't want to duplicate or replace psychotherapy. We were more interested in developing peer support and sharing within the context of being a student. We felt that many of the accommodation issues weren't being adequately addressed on campus. It felt like we were either going to be ignored or treated as patients who needed to be taken care of rather than as students who were trying to direct their lives by tackling complex issues.
Ultimately we decided the only option left was to form our own group without using university resources. I drew a series of flyers and we posted them around campus. We finally had a handful of students in the group and met for a couple of quarters. Unfortunately, half of them graduated and moved out of town. We never did get it started back up again.