This is the first in a series of interviews with student groups at Wesleyan. While it’s not possible to reach out to all 300-some student groups active at Wes, our focus is to get a snapshot of what different types of student groups are working on.

In this interview, I sat down with Olivia Chavez ’15 from Wesleyan Students for Disability Rights (WSDR) to talk about what WSDR has been working on.

What does WSDR stand for and what is your mission?

WSDR stands for Wesleyan Students for Disability Rights, and we promote accessibility on this campus. We also are involved in some local issues, like a while back when there were some issues on using scream rooms in schools for kids with behavioral issues. They had this practice a while ago where kids that were misbehaving or difficult to manage would be put in a room by themselves, so we were involved a bit in the activism against that through petition. Electroshock therapy is another issue we tried to address. It is a dangerous procedure whose efficacy has not been proven to actually “treat” anything and has been proven to severely damage the brain leading to amnesia, permanent memory loss, loss of short term memory, inability to retain new information, emotional and psychological trauma, and physical trauma that can include death. We were also sort of involved in the activism against that also—that was a trend that was going on in Middletown, and just in the US in general.

What are some things WSDR is currently working on?

So right now we are trying to get medical leave reformed. The process is not really transparent for the students going through the process, it’s a bit difficult for somebody who needs to go on medical leave to be able to understand the repercussions of what’s going to happen later, and the fact that when you’re on medical leave you can’t actually be on campus during your time of absence, so you can’t even actually visit, and it’s often hard to prove you’re physically and mentally in a stable state to come back. So that poses a lot of issues with students, we’re just trying to get the process to be more friendly towards helping students achieve their goals at Wesleyan and not sort of preventing them from coming back and having a great academic experience here.