The Tab’s 2016 Mental Health Rankings are the first of their kind

The Tab’s 2016 Mental Health Rankings have been revealed, and they show an astonishing variety in how different universities treat students with mental health issues.

The University of Kent topped the list, with Oxford and Reading coming second and third respectively. Kent’s combination of high student satisfaction, funding their counselling service well and having good outreach made them the best university in the country.

On the other end of the rankings, York finished bottom, with Newcastle and Glasgow narrowly behind it. The ranking comes as a shock to Glasgow, whose counselling service won the ‘Student Service Team of the year 2016’ in the Herald Higher Education awards.

Although it’s perhaps less of a shock to Glasgow students – both York and Glasgow were let down by woeful student satisfaction, with just 27 per cent of York students finding the university helpful when it came to mental health. Glasgow’s was even worse, with just 22 per cent of students saying the same.

The rankings, which include 30 top British universities, looked at student satisfaction, counselling services, outreach, and in some cases, waiting times for counselling services.

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The new rankings are the result of increased media coverage over student’s mental health. Until now, there had been no detailed examinations of how universities across Britain are coping with increasing numbers of students struggling with mental health issues.

Demand for mental health services has shot up at a time when there are less resources to go around. The Times recently reported that demand for counselling services has gone up by 68 per cent at Russell Group universities since 2011. The NHS is facing front-line cuts that affect students particularly – GP practices at universities get less money than other general practices. The lack of trained psychiatrists across Britain, plus the “cascade” of cuts down the NHS, mean that universities have been pushed into the front-line.

According to Jeremy Christey, who works in the Sussex University Counselling Service as well as being a Project Director for Student Against Depression, NHS cuts have had a staggered impact on mental health care:

“The NHS threshold has gone up, which means that it’s harder to get access to treatment in all parts of mental health services. There’s less money for inpatient services, so more complex people are in the care of crisis services, which means that more people go from crisis to lower-tier services. There’s a cascade effect that impacts students, and as NHS trusts know that students have a university counselling service to go to, people can often be pointed back in our direction.”