Counseling and Psychological Services announced Wednesday that they are preparing for “record numbers” of appointment requests coming in this January. The source of significant strife from the student body at the start of the spring 2017 semester, however, has nothing to do with the watery nutella at the West Union Café or pervasive institutionalized racism across the United States. Multiple counseling professionals employed in the CAPS office report the the annual phenomenon known as “Top Tier Tears” as the cause of the sudden significant uptick in appointments at the center.
According to the two employees Monday Monday overheard gossiping in the lobby, CAPS instituted a number of different proactive steps in order to prepare them for the annual occurrence. The therapists, who go otherwise largely underutilized by the Duke student body, were sent home over the holiday break with hundreds of pages of briefings in the latest techniques in treating grief in young adults and recent posts on the Duke GreekRank discussion forum.
“We tend to see a lot of kids coming back from the spring semester in a more depressed state,” said an anonymous CAPS psychologist who definitely isn’t Monday Monday’s therapist. “You’ve got a lot of shifting factors—the fallout after the holidays, the weather, kids coming back from abroad who just can’t seem to get good wine or a good ‘gram anywhere, as well as others. But by far and large, Greek rush has the greatest impact on this surge in appointment requests.”
They reported a mid to late January surge of “despondent lululemon-clad debutantes—both male and female.” According to their colleagues, many of these students come to CAPS to seek treatment for grief, even if the student is not self-aware enough to realize that their life is not over.
“I can’t remember who came up with the name ‘Top Tier Tears’...it’s pretty catchy, isn’t it?” asked an anonymous front desk worker. “But it’s actually pretty sad, when you think about it. So many students from all walks of life—I’m talking prep schools from New York City all the way down to Miami and to the Bay Area—come in here wailing at even the sight of a red Solo cup.”
“I had one patient, a young lady, come to my office and say her ‘life was over’ the morning the third round of Panhellenic rush began,” said another anonymous counselor. “She had called into the office demanding an appointment that day. When I met with her, she told me she had been cut from all but four sororities—you can probably guess what four, if we’re being honest—and that despite her 3.8 last semester in biomedical engineering, her loving family and merit scholarship, her life was going to be ‘#over’ now that she didn’t get into the sorority she wanted.”
The shift towards creating more awareness and accessibility for resources like CAPS on Duke’s campus represents a larger national shift towards destigmatizing mental health issues in all ages. And while CAPS prepares for their biggest sale of the year, Panhel and IFC have taken a few more gracious steps to prevent the proliferation of such pain in their young, impressionable possible new members (PNMs).
“We try to warn the PNMs about the kinds of disappointment they may feel during Panhellenic recruitment,” one anonymous Panhel exec representative—who got every sorority she wanted on preference night—told Monday Monday. “We brought in that fun therapist guy who makes awkward jokes and is the first to tell them what paying $80 for orchestrated small talk and emotional distress may entail, but I guess some people are insisting we do a little more.”
Panhel and IFC chapters have been granted the autonomy by the Office of Fraternity and Sorority Life to approach the mental health issue individually and as they see fit. One recruitment chair told Monday Monday that “PNMs should just remember to trust the process, and they’ll end up in the right place. I mean, the means by which we allow women into our sisterhood are sacred and time honored. Myself, my big and all my sisters came to this sorority because we were able to hold multiple semi-interesting conversations over the span of 3-8 minutes on four separate occasions. I want our members—our ‘Best Damn Pledge Classes’ of the future, if you will—to have had that exact opportunity. That’s why I’m not changing anything.”
She noted that over time her sorority developed a system to achieve the scientific Best Damn Pledge Class (BDPC). Their system is an amalgamation of individual scores based on short rush conversations that was actually based mostly on looks and race, a pre-determined “social media score” developed by stalking her accounts before the girl had begun rushing, the number of meaningful parties and pregames she attended in her first semester, as well as a “wildcard,” in which the rush chair herself could go through and individually manipulate all the numbers to cultivate the class she wanted all along.
Mental health problems haven’t just plagued first-year women. An anonymous freshman boy I overheard on the C1 reported feeling inadequate at a recent second round signature party he attended for an unnamed fraternity—though based on his untied loafers, we can all guess which two it could have possibly been. He said that with so many PNMs and “hot, top-tier ladies” there, he barely had enough time to talk about meaningful things with the brothers, like where he was from and what sports he played in high school.
“The DJ was so loud you could barely hear anything,” he told his clone/friend. “This one junior couldn’t even hear that I was from Connecticut and played lacrosse and golf in high school, let alone that I was thinking of majoring in Economics with a concentration in finance.”
Monday Monday scribbled this on a sweaty napkin between plays of “Mr. Brightside” and “Closer” on the Shooters II dance floor.
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