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Well I'm a Wellbeing consultant at the University and I work within the Wellbeing service. At
the Wellbeing service we have a range of different staff that support students, all who have
some kind of professional training in their speciality if you like, so some examples
of that: we have counselling staff who are all trained counsellors or psychotherapists,
we have cognitive behavioural therapists who have a training either in mental health
and then perhaps cognitive behavioural therapy, and we also then have mental health staff
who will have a specific training in mental health including things like mental health
nursing or occupational therapy.
We support students experiencing emotional, psychological and mental health difficulties
so that might include someone who is experiencing some homesickness or someone perhaps who's
experienced a life event such as a bereavement. But it may also include someone who's experiencing
a mental health difficulty and that might include anything from someone experiencing
depression, anxiety, an eating difficulty, some form of psychosis or bipolar disorder,
things like OCD which is obsessional compulsive disorder or something like post traumatic
stress disorder.
So if you were to come the wellbeing service what would happen is that you would come and
see one of our wellbeing consultants and you'd have an initial meeting and in that session
we would think with you about how your health is impacting, well you know, what is happening
in relation to that health difficulty or depression, how that affects your life and also how that
is affecting your ability to study and be at university.
The support that they may be entitled to are things like an Individual Learning Plan
and what that is a formal communication to their college that lets the college know
they're experiencing a health issue and it may also make recommendations
of support from the college to enable the student to study more effectively.
The other things a student's entitled to are maybe exam adjustments so
we'd think with the student you know would something like their depression, does that
affect their ability to study, revise for their exams, take their exams and
then we may think about what adjustments might be helpful. We also think about whether they
might be entitled to something called the Disabled Students Allowance which is a pot
of money that sits with Student Finance England to ensure that students with mental
health difficulties are on an even playing field compared to students who or are on an
even playing field with students who don't have any health issues at all. And as
part of that Disabled Students Allowance they may be entitled to something called mental
health mentoring, which is regular support that helps them again manage the impact of
their depression or mental health difficulty whilst studying at university.
For some students that's quite difficult for them to come to us because they're worried
about, perhaps how their difficulty or the problem that they're experiencing right now
might be interpreted, how people might judge that or whether for some people they
may feel there's a stigma attached to their difficulty, particularly if it's something
like a mental health difficulty.
But the main thing for the students to know is that if they come and see us what they
talk to us about will be held in confidence.
What I'd also like to say is, I'd really encourage students to access our service kind of as
soon as possible because the research shows us that if students get support quickly
there's going to be a much better outcome for them, how they're coping with their life
at university and their course.