Content Warning: This article discusses difficult issues around mental health and mental illness, including a mention of suicide.
Student mental health always seems to be on everyone’s radar, with Task forces, Charters, and Working groups on mental health wherever you look. OfS data shows that students with mental health-related disabilities tend to have worse outcomes academically, which highlights severe support gaps. It has been an especially hot topic with Natasha Abrahart’s suicide in Bristol, with many discussions in the higher education sector about what institutions’ responsibilities are around safeguarding their students.
If I’m honest, I find this one of the hardest parts of my job – I have lived with complex mental illnesses for over a decade, and it’s not easy sitting at a table with senior university leaders as a student who as fallen through cracks in the system for years. Mental illness has completely shaped my life since I was a child. While talking about putting in support for students’ mental health, I often can’t help but wonder where things went wrong for me.
To me, it has always felt like the cracks in the mental health system are not so much cracks but canyons
The world we live in now isn’t a great place to be mentally ill, especially when your needs are too complex for your GP or university services but not ‘severe’ enough for wildly underfunded, highly specialised secondary care services. It feels strange having sat on both sides of this conversation as the student in need and the officer trying to explain why the University’s services can’t help. University services are great at what they do, but they aren’t a specialist mental health service. As a fresher reaching out for help for the first time, being told the University couldn’t help when I was constantly told to reach out if I needed it was a difficult pill to swallow.
To me, it has always felt like the cracks in the mental health system are not so much cracks but canyons. Student support systems are simply not set up to deal with complex, long-term mental health issues, and I don’t think it’s fair to ask an educational institution to serve the role of a healthcare provider. At the same time, when secondary services are difficult to access, you end up stuck in a limbo. University services across the country do what they can with disability adjustments and NHS partnerships, but systems fail and when those systems fail people already at the edge, the consequences can be tragic.
No matter how unseen you feel, as officers, we’re here to listen. Our work might be slow, but I have faith that one day we will get there.
I wish I was writing this article with some kind of answer. In an ideal world, I’d be able to set up student health centres and change the way our student support system works by sending off a couple of emails and going to a meeting (in reality, any sabbatical officer will tell you that something as simple as putting up a sign can take months of back and forth…).
Unfortunately, we don’t live in an ideal world. However, I can say this – no matter how unseen you feel, as officers, we’re here to listen. Our work might be slow, but I have faith that one day we will get there.
