‘A mental health tsunami’: How are UK higher education student welfare services responding to the perceived ‘crisis’ with student mental wellbeing?

Massie, Scott (2026) ‘A mental health tsunami’: How are UK higher education student welfare services responding to the perceived ‘crisis’ with student mental wellbeing? Doctoral thesis, Liverpool Hope University.

Text SM thesis final version_.pdf - Submitted Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial. Download (1MB)

Abstract

In line with the known increase in demand for services, the mental health needs of the university student population have become a focus for attention. Higher education students have specific pressures, including financial concerns; workload expectations; alongside the balancing of studies with family and work commitments. Particular groups of students are known to be at higher risk due to aspects of intersecting identities. The impact of experiencing mental distress while at university has significant short and longer-term consequences.
This thesis examines how university student welfare services are adapting to the increased demand for support. It will consider what may be influencing the upsurge in requests for mental health support, while evaluating the impact of ongoing barriers that limit help-seeking, including the ramifications of stigma. This will be placed within the context of an evolved, neo-liberal higher education sector. In addition, there will be an interrogation of the language and discourse of mental health and distress, including a critique of the growing trend to label student mental health within a ‘crisis narrative’. The analysis will scrutinise national guidance, how these influence the direction of student welfare providers, and how the prevailing barriers are being factored into the response to student need.
The broad orientation of the study is to view mental health as a universal need, one that requires a societal response, rather than sitting purely within the biomedical model. To achieve this, the thesis will be underpinned with a critical mental health lens, informed through several theoretical threads – these include traditional anti-psychiatry perspectives, survivor driven discourse, the related influence of mad studies, and the overlap with disability studies. Drawing upon a poststructuralist examination of language, with a focus on Foucauldian interpretations, it will seek to explore how ideas and meaning embedded within traditional psychiatric approaches to mental health and treatment continue to generate stigma and reinforce negative notions of mental distress.
Qualitative data has been gathered through semi-structured interviews with student welfare service leads based in several universities in the Northwest of England. The data was coded, and themes generated utilising Braun and Clarke’s (2022), reflexive thematic analysis as the methodological approach. The analysis illustrates that student welfare services are seeking to respond to increased demand through reviewing and adapting their services, enhancing flexibilities, and broadening out the language of mental health and wellbeing. While national guidance and policy can be useful with supporting inventive approaches, bespoke localised responses are critical to meet diverse levels of need. There are mixed experiences of partnerships with local health providers that need addressing to ensure there is a consistency of response to higher level needs. Students, while requesting support from university services more generally, still experience social barriers – not helped by the ‘crisis narrative’ – and so the expansion of alternative means to provide support via a ‘whole university approach’ needs to be encouraged.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Additional Information and Comments:	Copyright © The Author 2026. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request.
Faculty / Department:	Faculty of Education and Social Sciences > School of Education
Depositing User:	Matthew Adams
Date Deposited:	08 Jun 2026 14:00
Last Modified:	08 Jun 2026 14:00
URI:	https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/4933

Actions (login required)

View Item