As we head towards the end of another academic year, the challenge of adequate mental health provision continues. The same discussion was being had when I started here in 2012. Four years on, funding pressures have intensified while demands on support and health services have come under increasing pressure. Here at York, 12% of students, around 2,000 people, had an appointment with open door last year. Yet the problems we are seeing here are not unique to York; an NUS study published last year found that 78% of students experienced mental issues.
So how do we fix mental health provision in York? How do we ensure that students are equipped to deal with the transitions of student life? To adapt and bounce back when times get tough? Well I think it’s important to be asking exactly what we should be expecting of the University.
There is and should be a legal, moral responsibility, and duty of care for students. The University has stated that mental health support needs to be increased but funding is lacking, as the Vice-Chancellor acknowledged in his Question Time event with YUSU last term. There is therefore a clear need for the University to provide greater funding so that services such as Open Door can expand, bring in further practitioners and thus see more students. A part time mandarin speaker and full time mental health practitioner have been brought in over the last term, but the waiting time for appointments still remains frustratingly long for students that aren’t in crisis.
So what’s the solution? Should the University be throwing more money at Open Door? Well the service does have clear room for development, for instance cramped facilities simply place a cap on how many staff can be brought in, and I’d like to see the service reassess how it consults with students, maybe exploring more open ways to gather student feedback in a forum setting so that service managers are really learning from the experiences of students and working together to address challenges. Financial support could solve both of these issues over time, but I think there are larger problems that we have to start talking about.
First, we need to acknowledge that there are more support networks within the University than just Open Door. Not only that, but the three lead issues the Open Door team face are anxiety, depression and academic difficulty. The landscape of campus support is pretty huge and much more can be done to address issues such as anxiety and academic support with College Teams, Academic Staff, YUSU and GSA. These groups all do their part to support students on limited resources. For example YUSU’s Advice and Support Service runs popular workshops for students that cover issues from budgeting to relationships, designed to help students cope with the ups and downs of university life. The University needs to be taking these other support routes seriously and investing in developing more preventative and wellbeing support on campus. How many cases that reach Open Door could have been resolved at an earlier stage had further support been provided through College Tutors or other campus support?
This also ties into the reality of the situation that Open Door is not a department that can fix every issue. The team work to enable students to overcome barriers to their study. But they can’t offer specialist health treatment and many of the cases staff see may require referral on to mental health services in York. This is where I believe the real issue lies. Wider city mental health support services are cash strapped and in flux. A mental health councillor at Unity Health was cut, Bootham Park Hospital was recently shut down abruptly, at least one City funded support service does not accept university students onto its counselling services, while another voluntary sector provider is facing such high levels of demand, they’re unable to accept new clients. The national Care Quality Commission (CQC) published a report last year stating that York has faced, ‘historical underdevelopment and underinvestment in mental health’. The result? Too many York residents have been let down by poor health services. Despite the growing recognition of the impact of poor mental health, equality between mental and physical health services remains a long way off.
Say what you like about campus mental health support, we can shout from the rooftops all day about what Open Door gets wrong, but we have to accept that these campus facilities are not a replacement for specialist NHS and community services. How do we fix the mental health crisis in York? We need to look outward and invigorate our wider support and health services and continue to build momentum behind the case for adequately funded city-based facilities for both students, and our neighbours in York and North Yorkshire. The University has a duty of care and this is how we can ensure that we are fulfilling that duty. Some work has started in this area, now is the time to accelerate it.