Students in Vancouver Could Be Offered More Mental Health Services

Reported by Billy Crosby

Mental health services in post-secondary institutions need a lot of work before they meet the needs of the students they’re meant to serve, say students and mental health advocates.

Crisis on Campus? was a public dialogue event on March 27 organized by SFU’s Semester in Dialogue in order to open the conversation about student mental health.

Sean Bains, event’s project manager, explained the importance of bringing awareness to mental health by trying to reduce the stigma and to make people aware of what he says is a lack of mental health services on university and college campuses.

Sparking mental health services conversation among students

“As a cohort we decided that mental health services aren’t where we feel like it should be at,” Bains said.

“From the event I think it is a wide diverse group in age range and I think our generation is really pushing for mental health to be more talked about.”

SFU student and fellow organizer Lindsay Wu said the purpose of the event was to give people ideas on how they can make their contribution to finding a solution to this problem.

“Hopefully people can think of solutions together, come up with what are the best ways to move forward about this issue together and looking at both the positives and negatives of what’s working and what’s not working,” Wu said.

Students working together to find a solution

SFU semester and dialogue student Renmart Buhay is looking forward to the impact their event will have.

“Even though it is still difficult for students, we want today to be an opportunity for students, faculty and staff to come up with future solutions,” Buhay said.

Advocating for more dialogue and easier access to mental health services is necessary to mitigate the mental health stigmas that are slowly disappearing.