Touring the Abyss Available to Purchase

This chapter is a travelogue of the author’s national mental health speaking tour across dozens of universities, and catalogs student accounts of unwellness and wellness, as well as university approaches to student mental health focused on campus counseling centers. The chapter argues that university constructions of wellness—wellness defined through ableist expectations of productivity and denial of needs with the goal of creating and maintaining the “good student”—are actually harming students. The chapter presents two tarot cards documenting student unwellness, each created with the help of students: The Student, illustrated by Matt Huynh, and The Pandemic, illustrated by Nguyên Khôi Nguyễn.