This documentary is about a BBC investigation into the mental health of university students during the corona virus pandemic. Within the first lockdown in March 2020 through May there were at least 10 suspected student suicides at UK universities according to freedom of information requests submitted to 137 institutions. In 2018, university minister called on vice chancellors to priorities student mental health on campus but over two years later nearly half of the universities that responded to BBC News responded that they hold no data or records on student suicides.
When talking to a tutor at a university they talked about how there has been a rise in student mental health issues and that tutors are not trained to deal with these complex mental health issues. Personal tutors should be doing wellbeing checks to see if students are missing classes or hand ins but they already have too much to do as so students are more likely to fall through the cracks. They also talked about how we need to destigmatise mental health so that more students will seek the appropriate support.
One of the underlying messages learned from this investigations it that many of the students did not seek support and instead kept their feelings to themselves and did not express them to anyone. A lot of the friends and family interview talked about they had no idea that thing were that bad.
The investigation also highlighted that there just don’t seem to be enough resources for universities to tackle this problem, Universities UK said the demand for mental health has doubled and universities cannot tackle this alone. This implies that more can and needs to be done in order to better support students with their mental health. Although the corona virus pandemic has exasperated the issue further, there was already a mental health crisis before that wasn’t being effectively handled.
Bibliography
The Student Mental Health Crisis (2020) [Television]. BBC. 15 December 2020.