Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Dear Associate Deans,
My name is Stuart McEachern (student no. 20081730) and I am enrolled in the Bachelor of Arts Honours program as of September 2017, majoring in English Literature. I am writing you to request permission to drop the classes ENGL 271 and ENGL 218 due to medical reasons causing my inability to perform in the courses. I am also requesting full credits for ECON 112 and MUSC 104 as I was able to complete the majority of the work but unable to achieve full credits.
I chose the courses ENGL 271: Black Literature as (Trans)national Dialogue: Responding to Blackness in the English Text, and ENGL 218: Introduction to Indigenous Literatures in Canada because their course material really interested me. Having moved from Canada to the U.K. in Grade 6, I hadn¿¿t been exposed to many Canadian authors in the English classroom. I was naturally drawn towards ENGL 218 to read more contemporary Canadian voices and to explore the unique perspective Indigenous writers would have, especially as a contrast to the Victorian writers I studied in High School. Following a similar train of thought, I chose ENGL 271 as both a continuation of my interest in post-colonial literature, and to compliment my choice of seminar class in the Autumn term, which focused on Uzodinma Iwaela¿¿s Beasts of No Nation. I also chose to study ECON 112: Introductory Macroeconomics, as I had already studied Microeconomics online in the Summer Term of 2018 and enjoyed applying my interest in Scientific theory to the real-word study of money and how to manage it. I wanted to challenge myself by not limiting my courses solely to literature classes, and to learn how the economies I rely on actually work. I chose MUSC 104: The Fundamentals of Music to further understand a topic I enjoy not only passively, but also take part in as I play guitar and have played various musical instruments throughout my life.
Unfortunately, I was unable to put in the effort that these courses demanded of me and deserved. My mental health had been deteriorating for a while and by the 2019 Winter Term, I was largely unable to complete necessary work due to an inability to curb symptoms of depression and anxiety. I have experienced such symptoms for many years and had been seeking treatment since my last few years of Sixth Form College. I first sought out treatment for this in 2018, scheduling a counselling appointment on April 6th, 2018. I was discouraged by the appointment, as the counsellor focused, in my view, too heavily on the death of my grandmother and the spiritual and/or religious aspects of grief; I was looking for medical treatment to root out the biological cause of my symptoms and possibly medication if it could help me manage them better. My tendency to withdraw from reality when deadlines and expectations start to approach caused me to give up on treatment and assume I could simply ignore it.
In November of 2019 I began seeking medical treatment again, scheduling an appointment with Dr. Borins, and starting on an Anti-Depressant in order to reduce thoughts that cause extreme anxiety. Treatment was helping but anxiety and depression continued due to outside factors including disappointment in ability to produce work on-time and to a standard I could deem acceptable, relationship problems, fear over my sexuality becoming known, and my mother being diagnosed with, and then undergoing treatment for cancer. Although the accommodations provided for me by Occupational Therapist Katie Bala were extremely helpful, and allowed for me to at least complete my assignments in the Autumn Term, I myself was still unable to properly participate in my classes, missing many lectures, with the frequency briefly improving in the Winter Term before dropping again. In the first term, when writing my MUSC 104 exam, I experienced high anxiety levels about half an hour into the test, causing me to perform poorly and panic with answers. I would also attempt to instil a false sense of calm for my family when they would call in order not to have them become overly-worried. I was anxious they may assume my safety was at-risk due to my illness, when it was really just my well-being, both mentally and physically, that were being affected.
This affected my schoolwork and everyday life quite significantly, even causing me to miss two of my exams, those for ENGL 271 and ENGL 218, due to panic attacks caused by my anxiety. I was often seeking extensions for assignments throughout the year, even choosing to move weight from missed assignments in ECON 112 to the final exam. I am planning on taking a short break from my studies in order to focus on my health as I truly do enjoy my time at Queen¿¿s and hope to return with the opportunity to achieve and maintain an average that better represents my abilities. Also, attached to this appeal is a letter from Dr Borins (filename: Dr Borins¿¿ letter for Academic Appeal), confirming I was seeking treatment and struggling with academics as a result of what I was seeking treatment for. The password to see the letter is ¿¿Appeal2019¿.