Student mental health crisis: it’s a matter of life and death.

In October, I started my placement as a counselling trainee, working with sixth form students at Formby High School. Yesterday marked the end of term and the end of my work there. In these nine and a half months - I stayed on to work with students until the end of term after reaching my 100 hours in May - I held 153 sessions with 16 different clients. 

It has been a profoundly moving experience and one that has provided me with invaluable experience, huge opportunities for learning and development, and, most importantly, the chance to play a small part in the lives of many remarkable young people. 

For all its positives, of which there have been many, it has sadly solidified my despair about student mental health and the abject level of support that is offered to students of all ages across the United Kingdom. It has confirmed for me that we are in the middle of a mental health crisis in relation to young people, not just in the challenges they are facing - not helped one bit by a once in a century pandemic, or the explosion in social media pressure - but by their experiences of trying and failing to access NHS services. I heard story after story of suicide attempts and serious eating disorder issues being responded to with a leaflet, the offer of an app, or facing a 10 month wait to be seen by a specialist. This is the tip of a very ugly, under-funded, under-resourced, under-developed, under-pressure and under the standard required iceberg.

Hardly a week goes by without hearing in the media a tragic story of failings in university mental health support, NHS provision for young people, or reports of another inquest, after another student suicide, which highlights another set of failures and missed opportunities to help the young person before it became too late. I followed media reports last week about the challenges faced at one of the country's - indeed the world's - leading universities with internal battles over how ambitious to be with their approach to mental health for their students - their fee-paying, wage-funding students - especially when it comes to suicide prevention. 

It is tough to read. It is even tougher to be student in one of these education institutions, who cannot easily get to see their GP, cannot access NHS mental health services when they need them, cannot see a counsellor in school - unless they are lucky to be at a school with funding available for counselling, which is the exception not the rule. It is tougher still when they turn to the organisations they are funding and are not offered the support they need - not just to stay on their courses and pay them even more fees - but in some cases, to stay alive. The risk-averse voice of lawyers and communication teams feel like they are louder than the voices of the wellbeing teams who wanted to go the extra mile to help. The same risk aversion that dictates watering down suicide prevention policies to reduce some perception of legal liability if someone awful happens misses the point. Doesn't see the wood for the trees.  Doesn't work for me. Doesn’t pass any test of doing the right thing.

I am under no illusions - and my time in Formby has helped to deepen my understanding of the size and complexity of the challenge: life for young people isn't easy and there are no simple solutions. I know too that even 24/7/365 immediate access to the right support would not guarantee an end to the mental health crisis but it would help - as would every school and college offering counselling to all students and every university taking seriously their responsibility to help (not guarantee but help) reduce suicide with more counselling, shorter waiting times, more proactive support, better personal-tutor arrangements, clearer communication with students and a genuine commitment to put the needs (and lives) of the students ahead of a desire to protect rear-ends, trying to avoid litigation, or feeling like they are taking on more responsibility than is reputationally-wise. In the meantime, young people are dying, or trying to die, up and down this country, in every age group, in every part of the education system.

In my private practice, I am already working with a number of students and have work lined up at local schools from September to help meet the enormous demand for counselling - the enormous demand for someone to sit and listen and to try to help. This is both hugely rewarding and underlines the size of the challenge: the size of the iceberg. This crisis is getting worse by the day and so too in the response. This is a matter of life and death. We are way past the point where action is required.