Educating and guarding young minds
Following a string of campus suicides, U of T students are pushing for easier access to mental health help
Arjun Kaul was in his second year at the University of Toronto when he started feeling severe anxiety. The situation wasn’t dire, but he says he began losing focus in class and developed trouble studying, even for his favourite subjects.
He sought help through the school’s health and
wellness centre, but says he waited nearly two months to see a counsellor.
“The fact it took that long, I found worrisome,” says Kaul, now a fourth-year neuroscience major aaand vice-president of the school’s student union. “It wasn’t as though my case was a threat to my life, but I still wasn’t very capable of functioning as a student.”
Kaul’s concerns aren’t uncommon at the University of Toronto, where demand for mentalhealth help is booming. Visits to campus mental health facilities have increased dramatically in recent years, with more students seeking the university’s help to accommodate mental illnesses, some of which stem from the stress of academic pressures and campus life.
Calls to improve the university’s mental health services were amplified last spring after a string of suicides at the university’s downtown campus shook the city’s largest school to its core. After a student fell to death inside the university’s Bahen Centre for Information Technology — the second death within a year in that building — hundreds of students gathered outside university president Meric Gertler’s office to demand action from the administration.
Since then, many students have joined clubs and newly founded advocacy groups bent on finding solutions to what they see as a growing crisis. As they returned to classes this month, many came expecting change from the university.
According to the school, visits to campus mental health facilities have increased nearly 30 per cent since 2014.
In the 2017-18 school year, the university provided more than 31,300 counselling appointments to students experiencing mental illness across all three campuses.
A Star investigation previously found that academic “accommodations” — special arrangements for students with mental health issues allowing added time to complete assignments — rose by 143 per cent at U of T between 2009 and 2017.
Concerns about youth mental health aren’t particular to the University of Toronto. Across Canada, demands for improved services have surged, to the point that Ontario universities have reported difficulty addressing the heightened demand while scrambling to increase budgets and develop strategies to expand accommodations.
Jake Ernst is a social worker and therapist who founded a clinic after graduating from U of T. He says universities struggle with the increasingly dual responsibility of providing students with both an education and health accommodations.
“I think the universities are really trying to answer the question of, what is the role of a university in providing students with health care?” he said. “Mental health care is expensive, it’s private outside the university, and students pay tuition for an education, primarily. Balancing the extra benefits is something the universities don’t always have the best practices for.”
But in the wake of last year’s suicides, demand for improved services is deemed an absolute necessity by students.
“For students returning to school this year, the number one thing on their mind is the mental health crisis and how the university can support us,” said Joshua Bowman, president of the student union. “Students struggling with their mental health can’t succeed academically when we don’t have the tools we need.”
Lucinda Qu, a founding member of a student-led mental health group, criticized the university for what many saw as an inadequate response in the fallout of an emergency situation, following the suicides on campus. Qu’s group, the U of T Mental Health Policy Council, was one of several student groups to form following the March suicide.
“The actual catalyst (for the group’s formation) has been years of population- and funding-related growth at the university, and the fact that that has never been commensurate with the amount of resources actually being dedicated towards the well-being of our community members,” she said.
By Qu’s count, and that of other students, the suicide in March marked the first time in recent memory that the administration publicly addressed a suicide on campus.
Sandy Welsh, vice-provost of students, acknowledged that the university should be doing more to discuss socially troubling issues with students.
“We need to find ways where we’re ensuring that faculty, staff and students are all trained and able to identify when a friend or a student is in need,” she said.
“We need to have conversations about the role we can play in terms of this being a compassionate university, and if we have those conversations throughout the year, then when there is a student suicide, it means we can focus on the family that needs our compassion and the students, faculty and staff who may have been affected.”
University president Meric Gertler issued a public letter to students and staff following the protest. It announced new initiatives to address the “growing challenge” of students’ mental well-being, including a task force made up of faculty, medical professionals and students to review mental health supports and services.
The university increased its budget for wellness counsellors by $1.3 million in 2017-18, and provided an additional $1.5 million in 2018-19 for advisers within faculties and programs for students seeking mental health accommodations. Now, the university employs about 90 clinicians and councillors to respond to mental health concerns across campus.
Bowman says the university can improve its response to students’ mental health concerns by increasing access to counselling and introducing more “academic forgiveness” policies — ways to recover from some previous academic challenges without impacting grades — to accommodate students struggling with mental health issues.
“Especially around exam season, from November to December and March to April, students shouldn’t have to wait long to see a counsellor,” he said. “We know it’s possible to do, and we’d ideally like to see counselling around the clock at these times.”
Last spring, additional counselling services were offered temporarily at the university’s Robarts library, one of the most popular places to study on St. George campus. Bowman says it demonstrates the university’s capacity to increase accommodations if they choose to
ccording to Elizabeth Church, theA university’s spokesperson, wait times depend on the severity of the case, with same-day appointments often available in urgent situations. Welsh says the university will be launching a pilot project that seeks to arrange same-day appointments with students who visit an oncampus wellness facility in an effort to reduce wait-times.
Ernst suggests that, along with bolstering their own services, universities should help connect students with offcampus, student-friendly services. Through the student union, undergraduates can receive coverage of $100 per private counselling session for a maximum of 15 sessions, an offer that the union is expanding to include psychotherapy in September.
Bowman notes that the union has seen an uptick in insurance claims for mental health coverage, but that there are still plenty of students who aren’t aware of this resource.
“Before I became involved with the UTSU, I didn’t know what kind of resources were available to me from the union,” he said. “So, from our perspective, we want to do what we can to ensure that students, especially incoming students, are aware of the resources that we can offer, and are also aware of the resources that the university can offer.”
As for Kaul, his struggles with anxiety impeding his school work have subsided. He says faster wait-times are a welcome improvement, even for students who — like himself — may not appear to be in a critical situation at the time they scheduled an appointment. The mere prospect of waiting extended periods of time can inevitably worsen a student’s health, he says.
“Anxiety and depression can easily be results of further problems. For some people, simply not doing well is enough to make people feel even worse,” Kaul says.
“Especially around exam season … students shouldn’t have to wait long to see a counsellor.” JOSHUA BOWMAN U OF T STUDENT UNION PRESIDENT