Petition Letter
Last Semester, towards the end of November, I experienced a severe mental health crisis. This forced me to leave school and go home. During this time I was unable to do school work, and my counsellor recommended that I take time from school and work to relax and focus on improving my mental health after this crisis. My counsellor also recommended that I talk to my professor about ending the semester on the grades that I had at the time, although when I spoke to the professors, many explained that this would not be possible. I worked everything out with my professors so that I would be able to take incomplete and finish the work before the end of the winter semester, however, now that this semester has started, I fear that I will not be able to do this. When I applied for academic consideration in November I thought that by January I would be feeling better and would be able to complete the missed work while also doing my course work for this semester. While I am feeling somewhat better, I am still not back to where I was previously and I am afraid that completing this extra work will create extra stress that will certainly cause me to have another mental health crisis. I have already decided to take a light load this semester, with easy courses, so that I can control my stress levels and focus on improving my mental health. I am nervous that I will not be able to work on this if I have extra coursework from last semester weighing me down. I am hoping to finish off these two courses with the grades that I had and rework the weighting so as to leave out any unfinished assignments. I discussed this further with my counsellor and they feel that this is the best plan moving forward and will help me control my stress levels. I believe that continuing with this counselling and ensuring that I am not overloaded with extra coursework will help me deal with this extenuating circumstance and prevent it from happening again.