To ask you too attend a candlelight vigil tomorrow evening in Edinburgh, Bristol or London

[Sophforthe100]

.. for the 100 students every year who take their own lives every year.

The law needs to change so that Universities have a duty of care to their students.

Fine out more: www.forthe100.org.uk/vigil

I'm a very regular Mumsnetter who has name-changed to post this.

The private external therapy was a slightly unusual thing, not many people were granted that, and it came later than what I was told by the CMHT.

I'm not talking about multiple streams of therapy going on at a time, which I'm well aware is considered to usually not be best practice. I'm talking about being told by the CMHT that they wouldn't consider or assess me for any support or therapy from the CMHT, because I was a student so I could potentially access the student counselling service.

I wasn't actually accessing student counselling at the time they told me that. Student counselling tended to be in blocks of x number of weeks and there was an expectation that you wouldn't just be seeing a counsellor non-stop — it was never originally intended to provide long-term, specialist, or intensive therapy for people with severe mental illness.

I think you're misunderstanding what "duty of care" actually means.

You're right that employers have a duty of care towards their staff - but in the workplace, "duty of care" means making sure health and safety assessments are carried out and that the workplace is safe. It means if a staff member is returning from sick leave, they have the support in place they need, including part-time hours or limited duties if necessary.

It means if a member of staff goes to their manager and says they're struggling, the manager makes a referral to OH and perhaps gets HR involved. It doesn't mean they're directly responsible for their employees MH or that they'd get people's parents or partners involved if they were concerned.

Fair enough. I think thats a poor response though and I would have formally challenged that. Strictly speaking there is MH support available through my employer but I have never been refused MH support via the NHS because of that, its not ok

However having the energy and wherewithall to challenge that while struggling emotionally is another thing

I still maintain, a university, just like an employer, is not a MH provider and shouldnt be seen as one and shouldnt be seen as needing to hold responsiblity for that.

Totally agree. I can;t support the notion that a university has a duty to contact parents of adults.

Of course they shouldn't; it's a disgusting abdication of responsibility by mental health services, and it's appalling that my university felt it had to fill the gaps by employing their own psychiatric nurses, psychiatrist, and psychologist, as well as the counselling service carrying students with significant mental health needs on their caseload, on top of the students with the usual troubles people might need counselling for. At the same time, I can understand why mental health services would allocate their inadequate resources the way they do; if I've got two people in need of the same resources and I can redirect one of them to someone else, then that makes sense.

Any young person committing suicide but I think it's ridiculous to hold the university accountable.

Thank you for posting that, @IHaveaSetOfVeryParticularSkills

That is very clear what a “duty of care” is

act reasonably to protect the health, safety and welfare of their students. This can be summed up as providers owing a duty of care to not cause harm to their students through the university’s own actions

a significantly lower suicide rate in HE students compared with the wider population (including students) of similar age

further legislation to create a statutory duty of care, where such a duty already exists, would be a disproportionate response

Universities should not be held accountable. It’s not our job.

Really surprised by the hard responses here. Many young people (yes, they're adults, but they're very young) are extremely vulnerable at university - they're away from home and their support networks, often facing situations and pressures they have no idea how to deal with, alone. Universities make plenty of money out of them, of course they should have a duty of care.

Do you work at a University Spartacus?

If so, the University has a legal duty of care towards you, as an employee. However it does not have the same legal duty of care to its students.

There's a weird and very nasty attitude to young adults on Mumsnet - once they're 18, stop supporting or helping them, charge them market rates for rent, fuck em, basically. Thankfully I don't meet many people in the real world who are so cold towards young people.

You've been asked several times to explain what you mean by this duty of care, what is it you think the employee has that is different to what the student has and how that connects to students who need MH intervention?

Exactly this.

What exact care do people want?
This is honestly bit ridiculous with just repetition of "duty of care" towards adult students.

Safer systems and practices are needed, supported by a statutory requirement to exercise reasonable care and skill when teaching students and providing support services.

They already do that.

So what exactly does the campaign want.

What “reasonable care and skill” do you think lecturers are not providing?

Universities are hardly turning profits and teaching staff have ridiculous workloads. It’s not the job of universities to compensate for inadequate mental health services.

I regularly deal with (refer on) students who are self harming, write me emails in which they tell me of suicide attempts, and who surface after long absences with a litany of MH concerns that require dedicated and proper MH services. No one considers the effect on me and my colleagues. Many of us are not trained for this and nor should we be.

if young people are that vulnerable then they should not be miles from home in an environment that should be designed to test them … except it isn’t because everything is trigger warning Ed or cut from the curriculum in case it causes distress.

The duty of care being called for is similar to that prevailing under employment law; that universities should have a statutory duty of care to protect their students from reasonably foreseeable harm, caused either by direct injury, or by failing to act. In work, or in education, 18-21 year olds are vulnerable enough to warrant this duty, and since providers are happy to take their fees, they should also take on this duty of care.

You've repeated this exact paragraph from before

What is it in practice you want to see happen? Describe the scenarios

You keep comparing to employers but employers wouldnt take on the responsibility you seem to want universities to take on

You're asking people to sign up to something but wont expand and explain what it is you actually want to see

I’m giggling to think that my university, in which bullying is rife and we are sinking under unreasonable workloads, gives a shiny shit about employee mental health. There some employee service that provides less than that which the students get. That’s it.

I think what I'm really saying is that if you build a system where mental health services are so shit and resourceless that people are shunted off elsewhere at every opportunity, to services that were never originally set up to deal with severe mental illness or psychiatric emergencies, then even if those services try their best to respond, people will want things from them that they could never provide.

Mental health services like mine offload responsibility onto universities because they have counselling services, but however much universities might want to help, or try to respond by hiring psychiatric nurses to deal with emergencies and seriously mentally ill students, they're not a psychiatric service and don't have those responsibilities or powers.

And of course it means that students who aren't severely mentally ill but want counselling because they're stressed or homesick or feeling a bit low or struggling with their workload will have a hard time getting an appointment, because of all the appointments taken up by people like me.

The solution to all this is properly-funded, properly-staffed mental health services with multiple routes in. I'm fairly sure that if a community psychiatrist had a suicidal student with bipolar disorder in front of them, and there was spare capacity for that student to see a clinical psychologist for bipolar disorder-specific psychological treatment, without depriving someone else of treatment, that psychiatrist wouldn't tell the student that they should just go sign up with the university counselling service.

Properly funding and staffing mental health services wouldn't necessarily directly help those students who kill themselves without accessing any services or who don't have a diagnosable mental illness, but it would mean mentally ill people being given the correct treatment by the correct people, and universities being freed up to provide more support to those struggling with life stuff and emotional troubles.

You are misunderstanding that duty.

The forseeable harm by act or omission employers must reaosnably try to prevent is not what you think.

But I don’t think these suicides are as a result of direct injury or failing to act by the university.

I read some of the stories, they are desperately tragic.

If I told my employer I was suicidal (and I don’t think they would be obliged to infer that if I hadn’t explicitly told them), then I would expect them to signpost me to services that can help - not actually deliver those services.

Their duty of care doesn’t require them to actively prevent me taking my own life. That’s not what is meant by “failing to act”.

Would you be happy with the university doing that? It sounds like they are mostly doing that already.

I think a statutory duty of care might mean that university’s reduce their MH services as they won’t want to over extend their duty of care and so they will do the bare minimum to comply, and may withdraw services which make them aware of students’ mental health issues as it would be better for them to have plausible deniability.

@Sophforthe100 if you cannot explain exactly what you want then how do you expect people to support it? The question has been asked of you many times and you still have not explicitly said what you want that is different from what is currently on offer.

How can a debate be held if people do not know what they are debating for or against?

It's not harsh to say that universities are not in loco parentis, though.

If any adult is struggling with their mental health, they need to speak to their GP and get referrals to counselling or access to medication via the NHS - and that applies to students as much as it does to any other members of the population.

The relationship between a university and a student is a business one. Students are paying for an education and perhaps some career support - they're not paying to access mental health support.

I struggled with my MH at university and I went to see my GP. It never occurred to me that my university was responsible for looking after me as an adult.