Yale University settles lawsuit alleging it pressured students with mental health issues to withdraw

Associated Press

Originally posted 25 Aug 23

Yale University and a student group announced Friday that they've reached a settlement in a federal lawsuit that accused the Ivy League school of discriminating against students with mental health disabilities, including pressuring them to withdraw.

Under the agreement, Yale will modify its policies regarding medical leaves of absence, including streamlining the reinstatement process for students who return to campus. The student group, which also represents alumni, had argued the process was onerous, discouraging students for decades from taking medical leave when they needed it most.

The settlement is a “watershed moment” for the university and mental health patients, said 2019 graduate Rishi Mirchandani, a co-founder of Elis for Rachael, the group that sued. It was formed to help students with mental health issues in honor of a Yale student who took her own life.

“This historic settlement affirms that students with mental health needs truly belong," Mirchandani said.

A joint statement from Elis for Rachael and Yale, released on Friday, confirmed the agreement "to resolve a lawsuit filed last November in federal district court related to policies and practices impacting students with mental health disabilities.”

Under the agreement, Yale will allow students to study part-time if they have urgent medical needs. Elis for Rachael said it marks the first time the university has offered such an option. Students granted the accommodation at the beginning of a new term will receive a 50% reduction in tuition.

“Although Yale describes the circumstances for this accommodation as ‘rare,’ this change still represents a consequential departure from the traditional all-or-nothing attitude towards participation in academic life at Yale,” the group said in a statement.

The dean of Yale College, Pericles Lewis, said he was “pleased with today’s outcome.”

The info is here.

The potential good news: The lawsuit against Yale is a step towards ensuring that students with mental health disabilities have the same opportunities as other students. It is also a reminder that colleges and universities have a responsibility to create a supportive environment for all students, regardless of their mental health status.

Measuring Information Preferences

E. H. Ho, D. Hagmann, & G. Loewenstein
Management Science
Published Online:13 Mar 2020

Abstract

Advances in medical testing and widespread access to the internet have made it easier than ever to obtain information. Yet, when it comes to some of the most important decisions in life, people often choose to remain ignorant for a variety of psychological and economic reasons. We design and validate an information preferences scale to measure an individual’s desire to obtain or avoid information that may be unpleasant but could improve future decisions. The scale measures information preferences in three domains that are psychologically and materially consequential: consumer finance, personal characteristics, and health. In three studies incorporating responses from over 2,300 individuals, we present tests of the scale’s reliability and validity. We show that the scale predicts a real decision to obtain (or avoid) information in each of the domains as well as decisions from out-of-sample, unrelated domains. Across settings, many respondents prefer to remain in a state of active ignorance even when information is freely available. Moreover, we find that information preferences are a stable trait but that an individual’s preference for information can differ across domains.

General Discussion

Making good decisions is often contingent on obtaining information, even when that
information is uncertain and has the potential to produce unhappiness. Substantial empirical
evidence suggests that people are often ready to make worse decisions in the service of avoiding
potentially painful information. We propose that this tendency to avoid information is a trait that
is separate from those measured previously, and developed a scale to measure it. The scale asks
respondents to imagine how they would respond to a variety of hypothetical decisions involving
information acquisition/avoidance. The predictive validity of the IPS appears to be largely driven
by its domain items, and although it incorporates domain-specific subscales, it appears to be
sufficiently universal to capture preferences for information in a broad range of domains.

The research is here.

We already knew, to some extent, that there are cases where people avoid information.  This is important in psychotherapy in which avoidance promotes confirmatory hypothesis testing, which enhances overconfidence.  We need to help people embrace information that may be inconsistent or incongruent with their worldview.