Not exactly expelled, but more or less equivalent outcome.

I have struggled throughout my adult life with a very severe depression. It caused me to drop out of two semesters just in time to keep from demolishing my GPA and to slog through another one on what was my last string of wherewithal and probably a heaping dollop of professorial sympathy.

The dean at my uni knew my situation because of the hospitalizations that preceded each of those nosedive semesters. He had a formal agreement set up with the local hospital to receive notification any time one of their students was hospitalized for a mental-health related incident; besides being himself a Ph.D. in psychology, he seemed to have put this in place for all the right reasons, like to allow him to hook students up to help to make sure they don't go totally off the rails academically just because of a bad episode.

When he got wind of my second withdrawal from an entire semester, he notified me that we were to meet to discuss my next semester. The upshot of that meeting was that there'd be no semester until I was "better." I was insistent on getting a sense of what that would take, because this was quickly turning into the come-to-Jesus moment I'd probably needed for months. I asked if it was as simple as getting a consistent treatment plan and sticking to it. Nothing; wouldn't give me a straight answer. Told me to seek help, come back in six months, we'd reevaluate, and if I wasn't "better" by his yet-undefined metric, it wasn't going to happen. Officially, I was not expelled, but a hold was placed on my registration, which I naturally learned by attempting to disregard his mandate. It was also such that he was apparently the only person with the power to lift that hold in the registration system.

This outcome pissed me off immensely; I was diplomatic, but I made very clear that it would fuck my life harder to leave school for half a year than to keep moving and know that I'm under the threat of hanging by a thread (note that my GPA was still hovering around 3.8). His response could be interpreted a few different ways ("what are you going to do about it, commit suicide?"), but the sarcasm of his tone wasn't subtle. He also said he wanted to "see how I handle the anxiety of this;" again, not necessarily the darkest thing he could say, but it came on the heels of me making explicit that I wasn't sure how I was going to or could. My majors were demanding, so I didn't work and lived pretty thin to ensure that I could devote time to my schoolwork and live within the means afforded by student aid.

After the meeting, I spoke with a few trusted friends who happened to be part of his professional circle, one of them a mental health professional, as well as my own counselor at the time who had worked with him tangentially a few times. Everyone gave me the same assessment: that, knowing his treatment of students in dire situations, this was likely a move to make me go away quietly and not bother him again. I was afraid to request my transcripts from the school for quite some time on the suspicion that he would follow me to my next university and attempt to block my enrollment. I moved away and found work, but I'm now caught in a financial rat race that is threatening to fuck my chances of ever finishing school. Keeping up with the student debt I've amassed, let alone just taking care of the day-to-day financial obligations of life in my city, is a nightmare at my current wage; I was thisclose to finished when this all happened.

I own my actions. I fucked up, and the reasons he turned me away were justified. I was a wreck, and I showed no signs of improving for well over a year. But he also labeled me, in so many words, a threat to the safety of the community, which I found incredibly incredibly disheartening coming from a psychologist. My history attests clearly that I have never compromised the safety of anyone but myself in crises of the kind I was experiencing then. This without mentioning that I'm still not sure where it was necessary to remove me rather than resort to some slightly more aggressive enforcement of my pursuit of treatment.