SU23 - Kieron Portbury for Welfare officer

Kieron Portbury

Trigger Warnings: Discussion of mental health, including depression and anxiety, self-harm, and suicide

Universities are failing students during a mental health crisis.

In December 2020, after weeks of being on medication and months of suffering from depression and anxiety, I deliberately had an overdose and tried to kill myself.

Universities like to be delicate when discussing mental health. They talk about “problems”, “issues”, and “challenges”, and when they do, they ignore the very real people being talked about. Student mental health is often talked about as this abstract problem that is not quantifiable or tangible, but the truth is, it is all too real and the students being affected are continually being let down.

For the OMNI 2022 research into student mental health at Queen’s, 2164 students were surveyed. Of those, 85 per cent had been concerned about their mental health in the previous 12 months. That is 1839 people, or as many to fill the Mandela Hall three times over.

The real number is much higher.

I use very direct language above deliberately. I tried to kill myself. Dressing that up as a “problem” is obscuring the reality and muddying the waters. We aren’t talking about students needing a little help with revision or some extra microwaves. We’re talking about a crisis in which students are directly suffering, their health is deteriorating, and they are harming themselves or others.

Queen’s currently provides counselling to students who request it through a partnership with an external company called Inspire. You can have four-six sessions with Inspire before being either let go of entirely or referred elsewhere. If you’ve ever experienced a mental health disorder, you may be asking: how is that anywhere near enough sessions? And you’d be right. Four-six hours is not enough time to begin to properly understand what you’re experiencing and why, let alone feel comfortable enough with a counsellor to open up to them about it and begin working on treatment. GPs can provide medication but this often doesn’t tackle the root cause of negative mental health, and antidepressant medication comes with a disclaimer that it can make symptoms worse before improving them – which for many, myself included, leads to self-harm and in some cases suicide attempts.

But that’s the external company, right? Not Queen’s?

Queen’s University Belfast’s Annual Financial Statement for 2021-22 shows a surplus of £15.3 million. Why, then, are students only able to access a maximum of six counselling sessions through their university before being dropped or sent elsewhere externally? It seems apparent that Queen’s has money to spare – so where is the investment in other programs, in tailored mental health support for specific groups, in tackling the root causes of negative mental health such as overwhelming academic pressure and crippling financial hardship?

In any university, one of the most common solutions to a crisis is to form a group to talk about it. The group will sometimes come away with tangible, practical actions, but often their purpose is to make the institution feel good about itself for tackling a problem without actually doing much to tackle it beyond the immediate short-term.

I’m running for Welfare officer because I know exactly what it is like to reach your lowest point in terms of mental health, and I know that there are real people behind the statistics and the dressed-up language. Queen’s can afford investment in more extensive and robust mental health services and I want to push them to do exactly that. I want to push them to provide tailored wellbeing support for LGBTQIA+ students, student parents and carers, International students and more.

In December 2020, I tried to take my own life. I am far from the only Queen’s student who has done this. We are talking about real people facing a real crisis, not a bullet point in a university’s list of their accomplishments. And I want to make sure this university takes real responsibility for the students it is supposed to provide for.

To see all the candidates running, visit the Queen’s SU website