8 hours agoShareSaveJoe McFaddenBBC NewsShareSaveBBCListen to Joe read this articleWhen Imogen arrived at the University of Nottingham in September 2022, she carried with her a letter addressed to the student wellbeing services. As a teenager, she struggled with anxiety and self-harm. The letter, written by her former head of year, was a direct plea to the university to help her.Three years on, Imogen (not her real name) feels let down. She has since been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism, and was referred for university counselling multiple times, but, instead of helping, she says it made her feel worse.”I felt like I was being thrown between services, no-one wanted me and no-one could help me.”Another student at Nottingham, Leacsaidh, who was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) at age 17, characterises the services as “one-size-fits-all”. She says that when she sought help for self-harm, she was simply given website references.BBC/ Guida Simoes via Getty ImagesThe University of Nottingham is certainly not an outlier, nor is it considered worse than other British universities for mental health support.Jana, an international student at King’s College London (KCL), was diagnosed with anxiety by a university GP, which made her eligible for certain adjustments, but she found the process of implementing them “painful”. Requests for deadline extensions, she says, were delayed by clerical errors, compounding her anxiety at an already stressful time.A King’s College London spokesperson said: “The wellbeing of our students is our top priority and we are continually making improvements to our services, which includes streamlining processes for approving adjustments for students with disabilities and wherever possible, removing barriers.”Given that the number of young people reporting mental health concerns is rising, these sorts of issues could get worse.Christopher Furlong, Getty ImagesFor its part, the University of Nottingham says it has invested in its specialist wellbeing services in recent years. A spokesperson says they “encourage any student with concerns to discuss their experiences with us”.However, they also stress: “University services are there to support the mental health and wellbeing of our students but are not a replacement for clinical NHS services to treat more serious or complex needs.”Which raises the question: are institutions really letting students down – or is the expectation placed on them part of the issue? And to what extent should the responsibility fall on universities in the first place?’Prime conditions’ for problemsThe extent of the crisis in student mental health came to public attention in 2018 after Natasha Abrahart, a physics student at the University of Bristol, killed herself. Ten others are believed to have taken their own lives at the university between 2016 and 2018.In the decade to 2023-24, the number of students with a mental health condition almost quadrupled, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), increasing every year to 2022-23 before dipping slightly in 2023-24.That year, some 122,430 students in the UK (out of a total of 2.9 million) said they had a mental health condition. Most were undergraduates, and the majority were women.Part of this may be down to age. Late adolescence (18 to 21) is what Dr Sandi Mann, a senior psychology lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire, calls the “peak ages” for many mental health problems, including OCD, anxiety and depression.There is no recent parallel data that directly compares the mental health of young people who do not attend university or higher education. But combining the stresses of late adolescence, academic pressure, learning how to live independently, and, for some, part-time work, creates the “prime conditions” for mental health issues, argues Dr Mann.A lack of “resilience” also concerns her. “I’m not talking about serious mental health issues, such as severe OCD, anxiety and depression,” she says. “Of course they need help. But young people seem to struggle more coping with the day-to-day stresses of everyday life.”Abrahart FamilySome have argued that society is increasingly pathologising normal experiences, and that encouraging people to talk about mental health doesn’t help everyone. Ben Locke, an American psychologist who researches US colleges’ support services, has argued that many mental health assessment tools cross over with normal human distress, leading to more people being told they need professional help.But Dr Sarah Sweeney, the incoming chairwoman of the student services organisation Amosshe, and head of student support and wellbeing at Lancaster University, argues that encouraging young people to talk about mental health has removed some of the stigma.She also believes, however, that more could be done to educate people about when something is a mental health challenge or problem. “Which is different from a diagnosed mental illness,” she stresses.Experts also point to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on mental health. Sally Lambah, head of student support and wellbeing at Wrexham University, argues that social …
