ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses how much work students with psychosocial problems have to do in order to get help and support. It shows how Caroline, Beate, James and Kasper spend a great deal of extra time and energy on trying to reconnect, recalibrate and reconstitute their bodily, mental and emotional state into some idea of what counts as higher education standards, norms and ‘properness.’ This work is often invisible. Further, the chapter shows how the students had also learned to understand their difficulties as individual deficits, as a lack of resilience and something to find personal adjustments to, whether through changing their physical and psychological dispositions or the temporal, cultural or financial conditions for studying. Finally, the chapter shows the identity work the four students are doing to cope with telling their stories to the different support systems, since obtaining help and support presupposes illness, sadness and the recall of unpleasant episodes.
