Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: To whom it may concern,

I am a student registered with QSAS due to mental health struggles. I have been diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder and Social Anxiety Disorder. Additionally, I struggled with self-harm and suicidal ideation in the past and I am worried I will recess back into these behaviours given my current state of mind. For this reason, I am submitting this academic appeal letter to drop LAW 206 after the official drop date. I spend half of my year in California, taking classes online. When in California, I live with my boyfriend and our roommates. In the span of five months, we lost two of our roommates and friends to motorcycle accidents. The death of these two friends and housemates has negatively affected my mental health and my ability to complete course work. Our first roommate passed away August 1, 2023 and our second roommate passed away February 8th, 2024. My mental health began to decline after the death of my first roommate and has gotten progressively worse since our second roommate died. In addition to the deaths of my roommates, my dads best friend who I see as a second father attempted suicide in February and has since been in a psychiatric institution which has also added to my stress and anxiety. With all of this combined, my mental health declined and I began struggling with keeping up with my schoolwork and fell behind in LAW 206 in particular. In specific, I find it hard to motivate myself to complete course work and get out of bed some days. I used my accommodations through QSAS but it was not enough to set me on track. I also applied for accommodations through Queens but was denied because I could not provide an obituary for the second death. My friend was foreign and his family took his body back to Taiwan for the funeral, and have not posted an obituary. I do however have an obituary for the death of my first friend and for the second friend I have pictures of us together and several news articles on his death. I waited to drop the class in hopes I would receive further accommodations but those were not supplied and I fell more behind to the point that I now believe I need to drop this class. I booked a therapy appointment for March 26th (which was the earliest I could book) and will hopefully get a doctors note to assist in the process of dropping this class. I am currently living in California and I have no support system other than my boyfriend who is severely depressed, since our housemates were his two best friends. I am overwhelmed with school right now and I firmly believe that dropping LAW 206 will help me better focus on my other classes and improve my mental health. Overall, I am really struggling and I feel that if I can reduce my course load it will help prevent me from becoming more depressed than I already am.