Sleep has been uneasy for me since adolescence. Some nights it refused to arrive; other nights it lingered only lightly, leaving the morning indistinguishable from the night before. When it did come, it sometimes pinned me down in paralysis, visions and noises crowding the edges of the room, leaving me struggling to rise as though pulling myself from quicksand. Insomnia, later linked to dysthymia, shaped the rhythm of my teenage years and followed me across the ocean when I came to the United States.
Back home in China, these struggles were brushed aside as stress or a passing phase. Mental health was rarely spoken of directly; when it was, the tone was often colored by apathy or discomfort. Studies show that in Chinese cultural contexts, emotional symptoms are often suppressed or expressed in physical terms instead, since openly talking about depression or anxiety carries strong stigma.
Arriving at college, it seemed at first that silence had lifted. In Core 1, the required seminar for all first-years at Scripps, conversations often carried an air of confidence. During one of our first classes, I observed peers bantering about how everyone was in therapy or on antidepressants.
“Stigma is not really there anymore,” they asserted, everyone nodding in unison. I was stunned — the casualness felt disorienting and inconsiderate, especially in a space that was among the least diverse on the campuses (Scripps is about 54 percent white, with international students making up only 4 percent of the student body).
When I finally gathered enough courage to share my own experiences growing up, the energy in the room shifted. My words thickened the air; eyes flicked toward me, then away. The room grew stuffy with a silence I couldn’t escape.
It wasn’t the blunt denial I had grown up with that forbade me from touching on the topic at all, and I was not reprimanded for speaking up. But if mental health stigma is truly “already” gone, why did no one respond to me? Why didn’t anyone try to address the contrasting perspective I had brought up?
Indeed, this seemed to be a different kind of stigma, one that I was experiencing for the first time — tied to a lack of knowledge on international perspectives and the discomfort that arises when cultural differences complicate tidy narratives of progress.
This new kind of stigma soon moved from cultural to structural. Like many first-years, I had been placed in a triple, a setting that quickly unraveled whatever fragile rest I could manage. Prior to arriving, the notion of formal accommodations — whether for housing or coursework — was not something widely available whatsoever.
Thus, the idea of requesting special arrangements was completely uncharted territory I couldn’t fathom actualizing. By September of last year, my sleeplessness was compounding under the constant disruptions of sharing a room.
Lacking access to a U.S. psychiatrist and burdened by enduring stigma and uncertainty over student insurance, I became hesitant to seek help, and the options closed off as soon as they appeared.
I wasn’t able to achieve relief during my first year. For my second year, my accommodation request for a single — backed by a medical note about migraines from my non-psychiatric doctor — was rejected, and the only real option left was to apply for the Wellness housing, which almost always guaranteed a single for sophomores and beyond.
Though the process wasn’t easy, through a compelling application, I was one of the lucky few who were accepted into Wellness with a single. Relief coupled with the knot deepening in my stomach: This was not a true recognition of need but more like winning the lottery. The single wasn’t coming because my true condition was considered, but because I happened to get through a competitive process. I felt unseen in a myriad of manners, by both everyone I knew back home and all that I’ve come to know abroad at college.
In therapy, there was the issue of cultural mismatch. When I mentioned my sleep issues with my then-therapist — white, American and clearly unfamiliar with how my struggles tied into the intricacies of my identity and culture as an international student — she brushed off my concerns and suggested I focus on “sleep hygiene.”
It was clear that she’d forgotten everything I had already explained: how I’ve had insomnia prior to living in a triple, the cultural dissonance at college and the fragile familial relations I was carefully tending to overseas.
I was exhausted. So, back in Taiwan this summer, bracing myself and mustering all the courage I had within me, I finally persuaded my parents to take me to a psychiatrist. I framed it in practical terms: It would be covered under national health insurance, no extra burden on you … They were wary, but they didn’t resist this time, as it’s indeed been years.
Sitting under the clinic’s white fluorescent lights and fidgeting with my sleeve, I described the years of shallow sleep and endless nights I endured, feeling a sense of relief I hadn’t before. For the first time, I walked out with a diagnosis and medication in hand, finally something concrete after years of circling around it.
When I came back to Scripps at the end of the summer, I moved into my Wellness single. That first night, after more than 24 hours of travel, I fell asleep without much trouble. But before drifting off, my eyelids fluttered with unease: I couldn’t stop thinking about how easily things could have turned out differently. In an alternate timeline, if the application hadn’t gone through, if I hadn’t pushed so hard at home, where would I be now?
Those thoughts continue to linger in my mind at times. Not just about sleep itself, but about how precarious mental health care feels, both back home and abroad as an international student. Just how much depends on luck, timing, or fighting for accessibility with more persistence than some peers.
Sleep, for me, is really about whether the systems around me can make space for it. In that way, my story is also part of the larger reality of international students navigating care across cultures and institutions, all of us sleepwalking through stigma.
Rochelle Lu SC ’28 is from Shanghai, China, and Kaohsiung, Taiwan. On the wall of her single hangs a smaller version of the same tapestry she has in her room back home, a trippy sight to awaken to.
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