2025 Mental Health and Emotional Wellbeing
Co-producing Better Mental Health and Emotional Wellbeing Within the University
Are you interested in a Grand Challenge with potential for you to directly influence ways the University can improve the mental wellbeing of the student population? If so, this Challenge is for you!
We would like your help to shape wellbeing and mental health provision within the University with your outputs having potential to input into the University Mental Health and Wellbeing Group as we work towards the Student Mental Health Charter (https://hub.studentminds.org.uk/university-mental-health-charter/).
This challenge will encourage you to think about student mental health and emotional wellbeing in terms of a Step Change framework. This framework proposes a whole university approach that considers Universities as places that can work towards the promotion of mental health and wellbeing. This can be considered to capture different community approaches to help students maintain their wellbeing, manage different severities or types of mental health difficulties they may be experiencing or address significant mental health crises they may find themselves in.
This Challenge will run on Streatham Campus.
Speakers and Enquiry Groups:
The following enquiry groups focus on outputs that consider mental health and wellbeing as residing within different steps for which you may have different interests or ideas.
The community(s) in which we engage can have a significant impact on maintaining and enhancing our emotional wellbeing. This enquiry group will give you the opportunity to consider ways in which the wider University community, or specific groups within this community (e.g. sports clubs, Guild societies, discipline studied, accommodation, personal characteristics) can be utilised to support emotional wellbeing. Outputs in previous years have focused on areas such as establishing specific community initiatives such as mapping campus emotional wellbeing walks, enhancing links between sports society mental wellbeing officers and wellbeing services and promoting the use of lunch breaks to take time out from study. This enquiry group really provides you with the opportunity to use your ‘lived experience’ as University of Exeter students to activate or enhance the University community to support emotional wellbeing.
As commonly experienced by us all, the daily pressures of everyday life, whether they be related to areas such as study, work, finances, relationships etc, have potential to affect our mood or stress levels. Whilst commonly experienced, at times they may start having an adverse impact on our lives and we may benefit from receiving support. However, people often experience personal (e.g. religious, cultural, age, gender identity, neurodiversity); provider (e.g. awareness of support available, accessibility) or systemic (e.g. service organisation, resourcing) barriers when seeking support. This enquiry group provides you with the opportunity to use your knowledge and experiences to consider ways in which help-seeking barriers can be addressed to promote engagement with emotional support the university offers. Such as the University Wellbeing Service, personal tutors or through sports societies or other groups.
From initially experiencing low mood and stress, some people may progress to experience depression and anxiety whereby the symptoms have greater severity and therefore a larger impact on their lives and what they are thinking, doing and feeling physically. University Wellbeing and NHS Talking Therapies services offer a range of acceptable evidence-based psychological therapies for students experiencing moderate to severe problems associated with depression and anxiety. However, there is always more that can be done, and this enquiry group offers the opportunity to consider outputs that can enhance the service offered by the University Wellbeing service and indeed can be fed back into the national NHS Talking Therapies expert advisory group to improve provision for university students nationally.
Some students experience the demands placed on them by study or wider university life alongside challenges associated with managing a severe mental health difficulty, such as schizophrenia, an eating disorder or living with the enduring impact of unhelpful patterns of behaviour, cognition, and inner experience. People living with these significant challenges may receive different types of support through the University Wellbeing service and/or NHS mental health services to help them manage competing demands. Providing and receiving such support however can present complexity in many ways to ensure the person is able to thrive personally and academically whilst services are able to ensure they deliver the highest quality of care and support. This enquiry group offers the opportunity to help draw upon lived experience, personal knowledge or interest to help Wellbeing and NHS services, and indeed the wider University, provide the very highest level of support available.
For young adults studying at university or in the wider workplace, suicide is the second leading cause of death (WHO, 2014). However, evidence highlights higher levels of suicidal ideation in the form of an increased susceptibility to thoughts and behaviours related to suicide within the university student population. The University of Exeter has developed an increasing number of initiatives to help students experiencing suicidal ideation or consider themselves at risk, such as training programmes to support the University community recognise students in distress, gain confidence talking to someone experiencing suicidal ideation and support help-seeking. However, we remain keen to learn directly from students to know what more can done to support students in distress that may form the basis of some really interesting outputs. Or perhaps you may like to consider ways in which we can further enhance the skills of staff groups such as Estates Patrol that are commonly called upon to support students that are experiencing a significant mental health crisis.