Jane Harris, Co-Director of Student Welfare and Support Services and Head of Counselling at the University of Oxford

Student Counselling in Higher Education: The Seductive Danger of the Medical Model

Over the past two decades there has been a growing narrative of crisis in relation to adolescent, youth and student mental health in the UK while population level prescription rates for antidepressant medication have doubled in the past ten years. Universities, schools and colleges have been scrambling to meet young people’s emotional and psychological needs, and in some institutions there has been a significant growth in the size and scope of counselling, mental health and wellbeing services and interventions. In the midst of this is a curious trend whereby University student counselling services are increasingly positioned and defined in relation to this mental health crisis, accompanied by an encroaching collapse of counselling down to the task of diagnosis linked symptom reduction. It feels increasingly difficult to ask if this framework of understanding is helpful, and that we may need to start whispering about the development of insight, identity formation, the overcoming of interpersonal, relational conflict and the vagaries of the developmental task of emerging adulthood. In this presentation I will delve deeper into these questions and invite us to think together about the collective task of helping young adults navigate life in a complex, sometimes hostile, world and whether the oft-pathologizing lens of mental health is our most useful tool in this endeavour.

Biog:

Jane is Co-Director of Student Welfare and Support Services and Head of Counselling at the University of Oxford, prior to this she was the Head of Student Counselling and Wellbeing at the University of Leeds. Jane is a UKCP accredited psychotherapeutic counsellor (Mst, University of Oxford) and an organisational Reflective Practice group convenor (Diploma, IGA). Jane is the Chair elect of HUCS (Heads of University Counselling Services), Co-chair of the Wellbeing in Higher Education Expert Group, hosted by Advance HE, a member of the Department for Education Mental Health Implementation Taskforce, the BACP Universities and Colleges Division Executive and the Governance Group for Student Space.