A lesson for university on mental health
This week, Victoria University’s campus council voted to approve a name change to the University of Wellington.
The university seems to have run a good process and the reasons were pretty solid. First and foremost was confusion.
There are six Victoria universities in the world, and about that many colleges with ‘‘Victoria’’ somewhere in their name. Between the state of Victoria in Australia and the province of Victoria in Canada, and all being Commonwealth countries, things are muddy. As a commercial enterprise in a global market, Victoria University has confusion rather than cut-through.
The proposed new name also clearly recognises its partnership with Wellington city and embraces the institution’s position as New Zealand’s globally ranked capital city university.
The decision was pretty clearcut. Indeed, some might say that councillors had a duty of care to ensure the institution had the best name to ensure its future success in a competitive marketplace.
A different duty of care was demonstrated this week when it came to Victoria University’s approach to dealing with residential students with mental illness.
Victoria operates a number of halls of residence, including Cumberland House. Typically used by students in their first year, the halls provide a good way for them to make friends and get to know the city before going flatting.
According to their web presence on Victoria’s Accommodation Service website, Cumberland House provides care, support and academic help to students who pay to live there.
Last Tuesday it emerged that a student who lived at Cumberland House and suffered from depression tried to commit suicide last year.
Fortunately she was unsuccessful. The next day she was discharged from hospital and returned to her home at Cumberland. Or at least that was the idea.
Cumberland’s manager told her she couldn’t live there any longer for health and safety reasons.
I’m no psychologist but I imagine a person who just tried to commit suicide is neither healthy nor safe. So the idea of telling them they couldn’t come home seems not just insensitive and contrary to their stated policy, but also potentially dangerous.
To add insult to injury it’s been reported that as well as booting the student out, they refused to refund her fees paid in advance for accommodation. It was only after her dad later contacted Victoria management that they finally got their money back.
Cumberland House referenced the ‘‘collective good of the hall’’ and the ‘‘impact on other students’’ as reasons to kick the woman out.
Both ethically and legally, Cumberland have a duty of care to the other students. However, they also owe a duty of care to the young woman. She had been sexually assaulted in the hall earlier in the year. It would be interesting to know how the hall exercised their duty of care then.
In terms of re-entry to the hall, it seems to me that the bare minimum in this situation would have been to deliver on the care and support promised on their website, and to arrange for secure temporary accommodation for the woman and access to a counsellor. A bit of compassion might be nice too.
As a person who has encountered suicide and depression in both professional and personal guises, it sounds to me like Cumberland believed there’s no problem so big you can’t run away from it. Not a mature approach.
However, it’s an approach that you often see in the commercial world as well when it comes to mental health.
A few months ago I opined as a director about the challenges of coming up with an approach to ensure that risks around mental health are well managed in the workplace.
Since then I’ve been digging further into it both from a
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