By Beds SU
Monday, 9 October 2023
World Mental Health Day is a day to raise awareness of mental health problems - one of our top priorities here at Beds SU and the University of Bedfordshire. Amina Awal, our Co-Vice President and lead on our Mental Health campaign, states in her Officer report,
“We aim to identify possible problems students are facing that affects their mental health, plan ways students can be supported emotionally and physically to help better students’ experience. The aim of this project is to have long term positive impacts on students’ well-being and academic success”.
She also says, “Take care of your mental health, it’s an act of self-love”.
So, let’s all contribute towards this important day. Scroll down to find out what YOU can do to support others, and what support is available for YOU when you need it.
What can YOU do?
A good starting point to enrich your individual awareness is the language used when talking about mental health. Mind, a UK charity that provides support and advice about mental health, finds that nearly three in five people regularly hear harmful and stigmatising language.
Below, we have highlighted some of their tips, as well as common examples of helpful language put together in a recent article. These will give you more confidence to have conversations that steer away from reinforcing mental health stigma, and inspire other people to do so as well.
Mind shares 6 tips when talking about mental health, but we wanted to spotlight the following:
- People’s experiences of mental health problems, support and treatment are different. What works for one person doesn’t always work for another. Try not to imply that one approach will work for everyone.
- Don’t oversimplify the causes of mental health problems. A combination of factors might add to a mental health problem over time - worrying about money, problems with relationships, experiences of discrimination. When reporting on mental health, try to avoid placing all the blame on individuals rather than the systems which can contribute towards mental health problems.
- Resilience is complex. Some people think that resilience or our ability to manage stress is something we can all easily control. But this isn’t true. It’s important to acknowledge things that might make it hard to be resilient, the stress or discrimination someone’s experiencing, or for example if they don’t get support.
Mind also put together a table of common examples which many people found helpful. You can see the full list here, but the information below is an insight to a few examples of general phrases to avoid, alternative approaches and why it is important to do so:
What support is available for YOU?
University can be an incredibly challenging period of time, whatever your prior experiences may be. It is not unusual to experience poor mental health at some point during your student journey and Beds SU encourages you to reach out for support as soon as possible.
In our knowledge-hub, you will find details of some trusted support services both within and beyond the University. If you still have questions or would like to discuss mental health support further, or if one of these worked well for you and you'd like to pass this on to others in a similar position, please contact help@bedssu.co.uk.
You can find the University’s information page on mental health support linked here.
We also have a self-help article on emergency out-of-hours support and contacts if you have any concerns with your mental health and wellbeing and you are not able to reach us.