12-03-2018, 05:30 PM
(This post was last modified: 12-03-2018, 05:31 PM by danbrotherston.)
(12-03-2018, 05:21 PM)plam Wrote:(12-03-2018, 01:56 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: I don't really have solutions, I just know during my time, it really wasn't talked about. I think there was a suicide while I was there, but I couldn't find any news about it or any discussion, and there wasn't much discussion of support. I was lucky enough to stay with family, but I can imagine how isolating it would be to live on campus alone for the first time, at the time, it was very much cut off from the greater community.
I also know people who tried to use the support services themselves, and they faced problems of weeks or even months of wait time.
These days if you urgently need counselling at the University of Waterloo you can get same-day counselling. In less-urgent cases there might be waits of 3 weeks, depending on the time of the term. Certainly a lot of us think about mental health issues and try to do what we can, both in terms of providing support to students and in terms of advocating for more services. The universities are large institutions and changing them is challenging, though there is support from the top at Waterloo. As a concrete change, we are increasing the number of counsellors as well; demand for counselling has been going up in the past few years.
(Talking about completed suicides is probably not the best thing to do; the public relations policy around that was recently reexamined).
It is certainly possible it has changed since I was an undergrad, and I have no doubt that individual people at the university do care about these issues, but large institutions be large institutions, I'm well familiar with the problem.
As for talking about, I'm not sure what the right response is, but when I was a student it was a taboo topic, even asking about it was met with "you're not supposed to talk about this" which I suspect does harm as well--or at least I felt distressed by being told that.