‘Good mental health is the foundation for effective learning’

UWE Bristol have officially launched a pioneering approach that will make student and staff mental health and wellbeing a strategic priority for the university over the next five years.

Along with Cardiff University and the University of York, feedback and best practice will be fed to other universities and could influence national policy.

“This is vitally important work for this university and all universities,” UWE vice-chancellor Professor Steve West said at the launch of Mental Wealth First.

“We’re hoping our staff and students will flourish: we’re in the business of getting the best out of people. The strategy has been designed to reach all staff and students, including those who see taking their own life as a possible solution. Good mental health and wellbeing is the foundation for effective learning and personal development.”

The mental health of students in particular is a pressing issue for education institutes: student suicides are sensationally reported in the national media, alongside emotive language purporting a ‘mental health crisis’.

While it is true that the number of student suicides has doubled in the last ten years, and that demand for university counselling services have increased threefold since 2007, these figures should be put into the context of five times as many students in the UK disclosing poor mental health on their university application than was the case ten years ago.

With one in every two young people in the UK going into higher education, and a total of 2.28m students and 410,000 staff working in universities, taking a whole university approach to caring for mental health and wellbeing – dubbed ‘mental wealth’ by UWE – is rightly an important part of the package.

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During the launch event, the journeys several students had taken to getting help for their mental health concerns were told through a series of videos.

Edie Woolf, a third year illustration student based at the Bower Ashton Campus, was one of them.

Despite already being diagnosed with OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) before coming to study at UWE, she didn’t disclose the diagnosis in her application because she felt she was able to cope with it. However, as the terms wore on, she found her illness was affecting her work and university life more and more.

“I think I got used to having OCD and I got used to a certain level of living with and managing, which was unsustainable,” she told Bristol24/7. “I wasn’t going into uni very much, I wasn’t working as much as I’d like to, and I really struggled to make friends because I didn’t want to be social. I was just taken up by anxiety all the time.

“I think there’s a culture of being really harsh on yourself and just expecting to get on with things. People don’t realise that if your mental health is so bad that you can’t even get out of bed or go to uni, it’s not your fault. So many people tell you it’ll be the best years of your life, and I just felt I was missing out and not doing it right.

“I went to see a psychiatrist about six months ago, who put me on medication and it worked really well for me. I wanted to get involved with the Mental Wealth First strategy to tell  people who are maybe in the situation I was in two years ago that you should get help, if you are getting in the way so much.

“It’s easy to feel that everyone else is dealing with things so much better than I am, and to feel you’re not trying hard enough, but if you’ve got a mental illness, getting help isn’t a problem.”

Edie had a pre-existing mental health condition that gradually got worse while at university

The Mental Wealth First strategy has largely been influenced by research and a framework created by Universities UK.

As well as his role at UWE, Professor West chairs the Universities UK mental health working group, and as such was keen to implement best practice in his own education institute.

John de Pury of Universities UK described it as a “pleasure to come to somewhere that national-level policy work is taking place,” and said there was “no better place to start setting out a vision for mental health in higher education than here at UWE and in the great city of Bristol”.

West was clear in his speech that mental health was a topic he wanted to be completely open about: “We are determined as a university to embed the Mental Wealth First strategy in the very fabric of the institution, to feel confident to speak out about mental health. Wellbeing should be part of our everyday language.

“This is a whole university approach, from the board of governors down, looking at every touchpoint students have with the university: from their application, to where students work and live, to graduation and beyond.

“We can’t solve this by throwing more money at it. We have to fundamentally rethink how we approach mental health and wellbeing.”

The first action that has taken place has been to audit over 200 mental health and wellbeing services currently happening at UWE. The results of the audit have been used to target investment in 24-hour services for students that were formerly lacking, and will influence workshops for staff and students in the coming months.

The university say they are determined that this will be an ongoing and transparent process, and that progress will continue over the next five years.

“We have to ensure we don’t hide, to ensure we empower individuals to speak up about their mental health,” West added. “I’ve no doubt we’ll get some of this wrong, and we’ll learn from that and not hide it.”