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University Mental Health Day 2025

 
 
 

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“No student should be held back by their mental health”

That is the vision and goal of #UniMentalHealthDay. Because:

  • 1 in 4 students have a diagnosed mental health issue
  • 30% said that their mental health has got worse since starting university
  • 1 in 4 students would not know where to go to get mental health support at university if they needed it

While awareness is increasing, a lot more needs to be done to address the existing gaps in knowledge, mental health literacy and the support available for students. For all courses, but especially medicine and healthcare-related courses, the pressure on students is intense and sustained. We all experience this and at times it can be overwhelming.

As part of pushing for change I’d like to share the key parts of my recovery story – which feels odd to say as it is still very much a work in progress – with a focus on what exacerbated and what helped my mental health at university, and what we might look to advocate for and change going forwards to get better support.

My recovery story is best looked at pre-, during and post- (during my years out of on interruption of studies) medical school.

The pressure at sixth form when I was hoping to get into medical school was intense, but it always felt manageable. There was a lot of support from teachers and each day was well-structured and predictable. It was clear what we needed to study and learn in order to get the required A level grades, and while the complexity of content was a lot, it was a finite amount and felt achievable with enough work. As with GCSEs, I was able to cope relatively well even alongside recovering from severe anorexia – which, since quite early on as a teenager, I’d used to get control over emotions and as a reaction to bullying. My mental health, that is to say, at school was not holding me back from achieving.

Medical school, as with any university course but especially with the incredibly high standards we hold ourselves to, was a different story. Suddenly the goal posts have widened beyond what you could ever have expected, and you are plunged into trying to memorise an infinite amount of content to perform confidently and correctly under pressure in exams all while handling the equally difficult task of beginning adult life. Looking at it in the cold light of day, it’s clear I was already burnt out beyond what I could handle as an eighteen-year-old. Arriving at medical school in London, not yet knowing the extra challenges I was hiding to do with socialising and needing long periods of time decompressing on my own between freshers’ events were because I was autistic. To me, the statistic around the numbers of students having mental ill health feels like a vast underestimate when between me and my friends in my year group very few of us could be said to never have experienced this by the end of year six. Mostly it came out in the later years, when years of burying and trying to get through it all finally breaks down.

 

It’s no surprise why; the expectation hike when you start university is massive and there is little specific support around this. Taking charge of and organising your own time and revision is something very few of us got right, and I only truly feel I even slightly have a handle on how to make exam preparation manageable now I’m about to start final year for the second time. Despite the big strides being made in mental health advocacy in society, it still felt very difficult to begin with to say anything to anyone when any visible struggles carried with it a lot of shame. Many of us are balancing an extreme workload at university with a lot of external pressure or responsibilities that we don’t tend to acknowledge or discuss or forgive ourselves for. For me, this was going through a five-year serious criminal investigation as the victim of sexual abuse as a teenager. Only this year is it going to court, and I was pushing myself to carry on through the years at medical school under unsustainable pressure and trauma for a long time before I recognised the need to step back and focus on recovery – which needed some considerable time out to access the proper support and therapy. As it happened, I only recognised this a month before finals.

Dipping out right before the end, and therefore choosing to go through final year again, felt like a huge and terrifying decision but ultimately gave me the best chance I had at true recovery. I can tell it’s working, because after many months out with rest, a strong community of support and understanding, the biggest sign of this has been getting back my love of medicine – which I hadn’t felt for a long time just struggling through. I think we should all expect to be able to hold onto our passion for what we do and ultimately our “why” for being in medicine.

Feeling supported to act proactively and get well-structured and effective help for our mental health should be a fundamental right for all university students, especially in the climate we now find ourselves in under such pressure from all directions.
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