Sometimes, as a subject matter specialist and lived-experience expert in mental health, treating with issues of mental or emotional crises in others becomes difficult. It may be at the times when my own issues are prevailing.
This is not one of those times. This is a season of doubt about whether the work I do here and, in these later years, more privately, can or will make a difference. Or more intimately, “Is there anyone who will come to my rescue if I am failing or falling?
Often, over the years, especially when managing a depressive state, I would feel a depth of aloneness the pain of which is indescribable. It takes great effort then to remember there are some people who care and support if I say I need them to so do. Too often, though, I do not want to feel like a burden to those people, and I especially do not want to tell them, again, I need help.
Truth is that I often think that if I have been writing about mental health/illness for more than a decade, living openly on social platforms for almost two decades, advocating for over three decades and being a self-advocate from my early life, I want to feel that someone somewhere is cued into my experience.
Not just that peripheral understanding but an intimate understanding. Someone who recognises my silence. One person who appreciates the difficulty experienced at times – less now than in times past, thankfully – to just get through a day.
Much of today’s sentiments are rooted in a recent issue regarding an individual that I, like most of the entire world, had no information or interest in until it became a matter that could not be ignored. These sentiments were stirred by a statement I read recently on the death of Cambridge Prof Jason Arday.
Arday was named professor of sociology of education at Cambridge in 2023 and highlighted as the university’s youngest-ever black professor at the age of 37 (theguardian.com).
He was found “unresponsive” at his south London home in August, nine days after his resignation during a period of intense scrutiny and widespread allegations of plagiarism in his PhD thesis and questions about fabrications in his expressed life experiences.
At the time of his death, Cambridge University Vice-Chancellor Prof Deborah Prentice is reported as saying, “We worked very hard to support Prof Arday during an appalling period of external criticism and focus, but given the devastating outcome, we are still asking ourselves whether we could have and should have done more” (www.bbc.com).
I have read every side and varying sentiments about this. The views are extreme. They are cruel and bitter on one side and supportive and soft on the other.
Whichever side, Arday’s death brought profound sadness to those who knew him as a human being and chose to recognise his inherent worth and afford him the dignity he deserves.
In many of those recollections, the late professor was described using words like grace, humility, thoughtfulness, gentleman, brilliant, beacon of hope.
But the rushing winds of public annihilation, intense scrutiny, and the excessive media campaign to expose and vilify him seemed to have overwhelmed Arday.
He was called resilient on many occasions as people paid tribute to him and recognised their good experiences outside of this exposure.
Though an official cause of death remains outstanding as an inquest continues into his “unnatural death,” many of us assumed that he died by suicide.
This followed reports that he told a friend in a voice note that he felt he “couldn’t go on.” Resilience did not provide cover in this instance.
The Atlantic, in an August 18, Graeme Wood by-lined article titled “Jason Arday’s Final Self-Delusion: Elevating a fraud is shameful. Exposing one isn’t,” said it this way: “But reports of Arday’s delicate emotional state at the time have led most to assume that he killed himself after weeks of accumulating revelations that he had lied compulsively for personal and professional gain”(www.theatlantic.com).
On his death, Cambridge professor Sir Simon Baron-Cohen told the BBC Arday, “was being subjected to relentless scrutiny, including ridicule, discrediting absolutely every detail of his life, and he wasn’t coping with the loss of his career, the loss of his reputation, and he felt he couldn’t go on” (www.independent.co.uk).
I hold no brief for Arday. All I know is what I feel deeply about the cruelty of man on the other. I abhor the way we ignore people’s humanity and dignity when we judge their errors. I hate this graceless, unthinking, uncaring and unsupportive world that I see too often.
“The ending of Arday’s life resonates everywhere as evidence of the lack of institutional and public support for a human who deserved a right to public help,” wrote Prof Sir Hilary Beckles, Vice-Chancellor of The UWI, in his statement on the death of Prof Arday.
A human has inherent rights to dignity despite their failings.
We must do better ... become better, even.
For Jason Atta Kwei Arday, May 9, 1985-August 14, 2026
