PHD Candidate. Immigrant from Malaysia.

It sounds to me that she was under quite a bit of pressure to be successful. The fact that she herself stated that she had struggled with depression for half of her life is further proof of this.

When you struggle with untreated depression for that long, you begin to get a bit paranoid about other people- you begin to think that others are purposely putting you down, and anything anybody says that isn’t perfectly 100% positive is taken as an offense.

Were the students and faculty in fact racist? Or was she just suffering from severe depression, which alters her worldview? Or is the truth actually somewhere in the middle?

Unless there’s video/recordings, we will likely never actually know.