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Petition Letter: Retroactive Course Withdrawal Petition for Two Courses from the Beginning of the Year

Dear Members of the Academic Petitions Committee,
I am writing to formally request a retroactive academic petition to drop two courses from the beginning of the academic year without academic or financial penalty. This request is being made due to severe, documented mental health circumstances and an acute medical crisis that were entirely beyond my control.

I am a Canadian citizen, but I grew up in the Czech Republic, where my entire family is based. I moved to Canada entirely alone to study at Queen's. Unfortunately, I was unable to cope with the extreme distance and isolation as well as I had hoped. Compounding this, my roommate and I experienced severe interpersonal issues, and I felt ostracized by peers on my residence floor due to my differing religious beliefs and practices.
Because of this environment, I felt I had made no real friends in the short time I had been in the dorms, leaving me with no support system to lean on. When I reached out to my family abroad, they expressed frustration regarding my sadness, which left me feeling completely isolated.
This severe decline in my mental health led to a state of profound depression; I began showing up less for classes and was cognitively unable to submit my schoolwork.; however, I stayed silent because growing up in the Czech Republic taught me to view mental health issues as a weakness of the mind rather than a medical condition. In November, I lost my passport, which served as the ultimate culmination of my poor mental state and pushed me into a severe crisis.

On December 1st, while my roommate was away, the overwhelming weight of this unmanaged illness culminated in a suicide attempt, during which I ingested 30 Benadryl pills. Following this acute emergency and hospitalization, I immediately sought professional help, meeting with an external psychotherapist and subsequently an on-campus therapist at Queen's Student Wellness Services.
After returning home to the Czech Republic in December to be with my family, my mental health began to stabilize. I returned to campus in January with a renewed focus and have since been successfully investing more time and energy into my academic life.
However, during the Fall term, my mental health was so severely impaired that I was completely incapacitated and unable to navigate the university's standard administrative drop deadlines, which resulted in me failing two courses.
I have officially requested my Discharge Summary and Queen’s VEC form from the hospital's Health Records department, which are being processed and shipped to my international address. I am submitting this personal statement today to establish my petition timeline, and I will upload the official medical documentation the moment it physically arrives.
Thank you for your empathy, time, and consideration of my file.