I’m writing in response to your article on mental health support for students in universities (Parents outline ‘woeful’ mental health support for students at UK universities, 2 June). Amid arguments that universities should become quasi-mental health service providers, university staff are already struggling under pressure to support mental health.
My mother is a mental health professional. She had nine years of university and three years of on-the-job training. I had nine years of university and three years of on-the-job training to become a lecturer. My mother’s training involved learning how to protect her own wellbeing while helping others. My training did not. Most university staff are not mental health professionals, and the few who are need more support.
My colleagues are increasingly suffering as they try to support students in what is described as “pastoral care”, but in practice looks like counselling, therapy and crisis work. It is dangerous for both staff and students for us to provide such care. I’m an economist – should I be assessing whether a student might be suicidal?
Students need support, but the solution is not training university employees to act as mental health quasi-professionals. In addition to insulting actual mental health care professionals, adding such responsibilities to a workforce that is already striking over working conditions is not a realistic solution. Many of us are already seeking support personally; we shouldn’t also be charged with providing it.
We are in this situation because of the dire state of NHS mental health provision. The Metropolitan police have said that they will cease responding to mental health calls. Shifting the focus to universities is a distraction.
The solution is to improve mental health provision across the community, including proper funding for NHS and university support services. I will resist making specific suggestions to support students’ mental health because I am not a mental health professional.
Name and address supplied
• I welcome the news that the Metropolitan police have decided that they should stop regular attendance at mental health calls (Met police plan to stop attending most mental health calls prompts concern, 1 June). A similar scheme has already been tested in Humberside with success for patients, who get better treatment from health service staff rather than police.
I used to be an approved social worker with mental health qualifications in the 1960s. We ran a system for dealing with patients who might have to be detained in mental hospitals, and very seldom called on the police. This was better for the patients.
Bob Holland
Cononley, North Yorkshire
• My beloved late mother was mentally ill for 10 years during the 1970s, and was then diagnosed with schizophrenia. During that horrific decade, she was kept safe by kindly policemen when she went out roaming darkened streets.
She once boarded a train travelling to London with a holdall stuffed full of notes. She said she was going to New York, where her sister lived. We hastily alerted the railway police at King’s Cross. They apprehended her, then waited for my son to arrive, escorting them to hospital, where she was sectioned.
Fifty years later, when poverty and knife crime are rife, my mother would need those guardian angels in blue even more.
Marie Davis
Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire
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