Lucy* hadn\u2019t quite realised how severe her problems were.<\/p>\n
She\u2019d fallen in love with the university, in the south of England, as a teenager while visiting her big sister there. When she applied to go there herself, on a geography course, she had high hopes of what she\u2019d do with her career.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted to help people in the Global South and fight climate change,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
She dreamed of joining the UN or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change once she\u2019d done her degree.<\/p>\n
She\u2019d had problems with her mental health before arriving at university, a range of symptoms that she thinks may have been undiagnosed bipolar disorder but generally describes as depression and anxiety.<\/p>\n
Over the course of her first year, her mental health got much worse. But she put off going to a counsellor because she struggled to fill in the required forms. In her second year, she finally made that step.<\/p>\n
But Lucy didn\u2019t feel the counsellor listened to her. \u201cShe didn\u2019t really understand work as a student at all. There was a highly toxic culture of studying so much, but she didn\u2019t seem to understand or give me anything to counteract that. She just said what I was doing was wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n
So when Lucy decided she needed some time out, the counsellor refused to recommend it to the university. Her mental health wasn\u2019t deemed bad enough. \u201cBy this point,\u201d Lucy says, \u201cI was suicidal.\u201d<\/p>\n
Without a note from her counsellor, there was no guarantee Lucy could come back if she took a break. She shared her worries with a tutor. He was an academic, but someone she trusted, who saw pastoral care as part of his role. He suggested she ease up on the effort of studying for a while and see how she felt after term ended.<\/p>\n
That summer, he gave her a call to check up. They talked through how she was feeling. A couple of weeks before her final year started, she decided to drop out.<\/p>\n