if you've ever been a uni student or even lived with a uni student you probably know how stressful university can be sometimes but it wasn't until this touched me quite personally that I realized how serious this could really be when one of my close friends tried to take their own life and was hospitalized just hours after talking to me seemingly cheerful at university I was devastated I began to ask myself how this could have happened what I could have done differently and why I didn't see any warning signs and trying to understand I began to
research and what I discovered was that universities not just here but all over the world were facing nothing short of a crisis in student mental health despite a whole array of student and staff led initiatives and a considerable spend on mental health support services one out of every four university students will experience mental health in a given year and here at my own University less than six out of ten students write their mental health being good and that's a real problem what that means is that of the people in the audience here today over a
hundred us are not in a good headspace take a look at this graph illustrates the size of the trend over the last ten years the number of students who have reported having a mental illness to their university has increased fivefold and in the United Kingdom where this has been studied more thoroughly than here in Australia the trends are truly shocking in the last 15 years young people have become 27% more likely to experience mental illness and the number of student deaths by suicide has increased by 75% between 2007 and 2015 think about that for a
second every one of those numbers is a person a person with a life and friends family fear aspirations and an innate humanist that demands respect for these lives to be lost not only very quickly but at an increasingly rapid rate is nothing short of unacceptable for me as a student leader that raises two really big questions firstly why is this happening and secondly what can we do about it if you ask someone on a street corner why students aren't in a good headspace you'll get a variety of responses one person might say that students are
generations of snowflakes now you get to be offended by anything and anything another might say that students have their heads buried in their phones and aren't making connection with others and the third person will say that students are drinking far too much and not getting enough sleep something I've certainly never indulged in the fact of the matter is that we don't definitively understand why young people are experiencing it and why students are experiencing it toward a greater degree than their peers but what we do know is that university environments expose students to a whole range
of stresses both inside and outside of the classroom these are parts of their experience that expose them to a little bit more stress than what they experience every day which can then have a follow-on effect on their mental health a 2013 study uncovered that there were several broad classes of stressors that impact upon student mental health academic stress things like assignments tests and exams a lack of resources not having enough time or money changing relationships ones with your parents family friends new romantic relationships and new peers changing expectations both ones that you put on yourself
and from others and being in a new and unfamiliar environment when you come to think of it that's not really that surprising for a second imagine that you're a 17 year old you've just finished high school and you're ready to enter the big wide world you start in a commencing class of 8,000 undergraduates and all of your friends from high school if indeed any came to uni with you are all studying something entirely different and you know no one your first mid SEM is next week and you've got a hundred pages of a textbook to
read that you don't really understand your parents have cut off your allowance you're living on a shoestring budget trying to make ends meet and getting lost on campus every single day you've got an assessment due on the weekend but you don't understand any of the academic referencing stuff that you have to do for it and you can't find anyone anywhere to help you with it maybe your dad's projecting onto you that he wanted to be an astrophysicist and you just want to study economics how does that make you feel yeah it's pretty easy to imagine
getting home from uni and feeling pretty to flight it the fact of the matter is that universities are psycho socially stressful environments what we're doing is we're taking people who are in a really seminal time of their life and putting them into an environment which has the potential to crush them and that's even harder if you've got something else going on in your life if you're unsure about your gender or sexual identity if you're coming from a culturally linguistically diverse background have a disability or have moved from the regions to study at University circumstances like
these put up even more barriers for students and my hypothesis is that one of the reasons that student mental health has been on a steep decline is because these stresses have been getting bigger universities have become more impersonal the job markets become fiercely more competitive and the world is a place that has more and more expectations on what students should do and who they should be and that makes it really tough to be a uni student today I want to talk to you about three ways that we and universities can break down these stressors and
improve student mental health if we want to do that we can decrease the amount of stresses and their severity we can reduce the impact that these stressors have on the individual or we can let the stressors do their worst and then deal with the aftermath no prizes for guessing that what we've traditionally done is pretty much just the last one what we actually need to do is harness all three of these approaches we need to make universities as psycho socially safe as possible we need to help to build resilience in young people particularly in students
to help them get through stressful situations and we need to be there to pick up the pieces if at all pear-shaped I'm going to take you through those one by one let's start with decreasing stresses in the university environment this one sounds pretty tricky but there's actually quite a few levers we can pull and we can start by referring back to some of the stresses I talked about just before let's take academic stress we can use academic policy to reshape the way that students experience teaching and assessment at university for example students at my university
so that one of the most stressful parts of their experience is exams what could we do about that there's actually quite a few things we could give them more time to study we could spread the exams out from each other we could decrease their weighting so that doesn't make or break their mark and although these all sound like pretty small changes if we make enough of them in aggregate they can make a real impact on the way that someone experiences University and that doesn't mean that we're going soft on assessment we're not preparing students for
the world it means that we're putting their well-being at the center of our teaching and learning process another big stressor that students encounter is financial stress we've all heard the stereotype of poor uni students who can't afford their next meal but the fact of the matter is that financial hardship is a hallmark of many students experience of university governments have it within their power to give students easier access to funds financial aid and universities can give scholarships to students who need them the most and for these students that can give them enough time to focus
on themselves and on their studies while at uni another scarce resource for students is sleep we all know that getting a good night's rest is important for staying mentally healthy and keeping up so without acting like an overbearing parent of a third-year uni student telling them to get off Netflix and go to bed we need to be actively encouraging students to get enough rest and teaching them about the importance of a good night's sleep so we've decreased the stresses in the environment and it's now a bit better let's talk about how we can help students
to get through the remaining stress what we're actually talking about here is building resilience how do we help people to get through tricky times one of the main ways to do this is actually pretty simple it's building connection between people it's not surprising that the single most protective against mental illness he's having a strong support network so universities need to help students to make friends when they start uni and that can be through clubs and societies volunteering sport mentoring or something else entirely but building an inclusive social PAP fabric is absolutely vital for the modern
University and can never be dispensed with another important approach is Health Promotion and in the mental health space this is all about teaching people how to look after themselves and that can be simple things like arm strategies for self-care or mindfulness or more complicated things like teaching people to understand their well being and when they're not doing so well and need to get some help we can also combine this two approaches and bring people together to support each other in the old spirit of mate ship programs like mental health first aid teach people to intervene
in mental health crises and make them more literate about mental health and events like are you okay day create a space where people feel more comfortable talking to their friends about mental health and this creates an interconnected community who support each other and look out for each other let's talk about dealing with helping students who are really struggling for a second think about well-being on a spectrum from unwell to very well up here you're living your best life you're smelling the roses you're the real best version of yourself and down here you're really struggling it's
hard to get out of bed in the morning you're getting pretty close to crisis point what we've traditionally done so we've waited for people to be at a pretty high risk of crisis so down this end of the spectrum before we give them access to support services what we actually need to do is invest in services and support across this entire spectrum of well-being because if we were thinking of physical health let's say someone had a hairline fracture in their leg you wouldn't wait until it was a clean break and there was bone poking through
the skin before you let them go to hospital so we need to invest across the entire spectrum and that will help people who are doing pretty good to stay in a good spot and will help people who are in a crisis to get some immediate help and everything in between so we've talked about how we can break down stresses and strategies for improving students well-being let's talk now about how we're going to do it the short answer is together for too long universities and many other institutions have siloed support services and put them off into
a corner waiting for people to come to them in a crisis instead of doing this what we actually need to do is work together with these services to find and implement new ways of promoting work mental well-being and breaking down stigma around mental illness universities UK called us a whole of institution approach it's one that engages the university's academic staff its professional staff students clinicians senior leaders and the community in the solution and it's accurately and very eloquently depicted by the children and young people's mental health coalition as having an approach to mental health that
permeates every aspect of work and is embedded across policies cultures curricula and practice within the university what this is is a culture shift it's bringing everyone together and putting mental health at the center of what we're doing in universities with all this talk of what universities and key decision-makers ought to do you'd be justified in asking well what can I do in my own life so I want to leave you today with three simple tips of things that you can do that could make a difference to someone else's mental well-being number one look out for
your friends make time for them talk to them and support them to seek help when they need it number 2 breakdown mental health stigma go to an effort to learn a little bit more about about well-being and mental illness call out jokes about things like depression anxiety and suicide and when you hear stigma around you call it out and thirdly be radically inclusive value people for who they are and for their uniqueness and empower them to be their authentic self with you the kind of change that we need is a challenge it takes all of
us working together with determination persistence and focus if we can do that we can get ahead of this trend against the odds and that will save lives thank you [Applause] you
