(12-03-2018, 05:30 PM)danbrotherston Wrote:(12-03-2018, 05:21 PM)plam Wrote: 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.
Suicide, and indeed mental illness, is still taboo, which is really sad. What I am surprised about is that they're not advertising resources outside of that area. They need to choose to advertise and provide free transportation for sick students, to get checked out, for example, KW Counselling or Front Door -- as well, most kids parents insurance continues to provide healthcare not covered by OHIP, so it opens other options too, like Mosaic Counselling and Homewood Health Services. Lots of resources outside the university. They just need to have orientation every semester to remind the young adults where they can go and what they should do, for example, avoid alcohol.