University grads also need mental health support

Alumni sometimes suffer for years, writes Karli Zschogner.

Universities are usually eager to reach out to their alumni for money and support. And they offer some perks back, too: spa and hairdresser discounts, for instance, along with deals on hotels or car rentals. But if they really want graduates to feel connected, they should offer something more tangible: mental health and career support.

The University of Ottawa alumni experience remains outdated in this area. While the university has made strides in addressing mental health among current students (of whom five have died by suicide in recent years), there remain those missed: struggling people who have graduated and still suffer from inadequate mental health and career supports.

This is why family and friends of a uOttawa graduate who recently died by suicide are amplifying a petition that lays out four specific demands to alumni services — including opening mental health and career counselling, and improving the student-to-alumni career path development.

Michael Burchill, 28, died by suicide on Dec. 16. The uOttawa alumnus had been open about navigating depression, which developed during his undergraduate degree. Navigating career paths was a large factor in his mental health struggles. More recently, pandemic isolation, job cuts and interview rejections added to the burden.

Michael graduated with a bachelor's degree in social science in 2015 while he was president of the Ukrainian Students Club. As a cadet, he was awarded the highest honour: the Lord Strathcona Medal Award. He cared very much about truth and reconciliation, LGBTQ+ and women's rights, and men's health. He was also passionate about addressing the disparity of access to services and post-secondary education.

Many students are overwhelmed with the mental health stresses of their university life, and this can carry over into life after graduation. Often, in-course work very minimally, if at all, shows how content being taught can be adapted into careers.

Elizabeth Kristjansson, uOttawa's new mental health adviser, says there's a need across faculties to increase group work to reduce the experience of isolation and better prepare students for the working world.

“It's a systemic problem. We're never taught how to work well with each other,” she said in an interview last fall. “We need to incorporate more teamwork into our courses.”

She notes positive models she has seen in some psychology labs. “They automatically have a group to turn to,” she said, “where older students help the young, talk to each other about what's going on, and they can talk about their research. They can talk about their problems with friends to each other.”

But who to turn to for those who have moved on from university? Free or accessible services that are available, at the YMCA or through the John Howard Society, for instance, are very basic skills for someone who has graduated from post-secondary.

The month Michael and I both graduated, in June 2015, uOttawa delegates participated in the development of the international Okanagan Charter. The charter provides educational institutions with a common framework for promoting health and well-being. It was finally signed by uOttawa on Jan. 18 of this year.

Career counselling, less expensive than the involvement of the medical system, would be a more affordable and essential service to offer for improving one's fundamental need of purpose, direction and self-worth.

It is time for universities, and all educational institutions, to take more responsibility for health and wellness with better career guidance, not just to current and future students, but for those who have graduated.

Karli Zschogner is an Ottawa-based multimedia journalist originally from the Parry Sound region under the Huron-Robinson Treaty. She is a graduate in conflict studies and human rights from the University of Ottawa and journalism at the University of King's College, and has been a multimedia journalism trainer/mentor in Northwestern Ontario First Nations under Journalists for Human Rights.