Arriving in Cambridge and sitting down for a welcome talk in Freshers’ week, among the hoards of information thrown at me I remember hearing a long list of ‘ports of call’ reeled off: tutor, DoS, college nurse, wellbeing officer, student welfare officer, college chaplain. It felt like the second my essay deadline pileup tipped from manageable, to unsustainable, to impossible, there would be a queue of people lining up to hand me a warm cup of tea and a biscuit and help me figure it all out.

Yet last week, a Varsity investigation found that one in ten students don’t feel comfortable talking to any of the main sources of wellbeing support offered by the University or colleges, while only 18% see their tutors as their preferred initial point of contact about their wellbeing, despite the University branding tutors as a “a helpful first point of call for students”. The worrying fact that so few students feel comfortable going to the very first stop on this list of services exposes that this system doesn’t work as well as it’s made to appear. As so many of us don’t know where to turn when we hit crisis point, the issue is clearly not that there are not enough people to talk to, but that these people are unfortunately not all genuine mental health services – and are not properly equipped to deal with the reality students are facing.

Placing the responsibility of being the first point of contact in the hands of a randomly-assigned academic, whose primary input in many students’ lives is asking them if they’ve been going to their lectures and reading their report to them in a five-minute chat at the end of term, is clearly not enough. The fact that some students have had this chat reduced to a simple online form, further restricting this already limited interaction, exposes the harsh superficiality beneath the security of this ‘port-of-call’.

“When you’re struggling, taking the first step to tell someone about it can take an incredible amount of courage”

When you’re struggling, taking the first step to tell someone about it can take an incredible amount of courage. So if this first interaction leaves you feeling dismissed and ignored, the presence of several systems further down the lines essentially becomes redundant. If they don’t feel accessible, if students are forced to seek them out and make sense of their various processes when they’re already feeling overwhelmed, their presence is pointless.

As one student in the survey put it, the flaw in the tutorial system lies in its reliance upon “full time academics who are overworked and busy” dealing with stressed students. Placing an extra responsibility upon chronically-busy professors whose expertise and priority is not always our mental health exposes how the weight of students’ wellbeing is being thrown between various individuals before it gets to the services who can really help – a time-consuming process which many students in crisis cannot afford.

When you’re struggling with workload, or problems unrelated to academics have come in the way of you completing your studies to the quality you’d hope, there can be an element of shame attached to speaking to someone associated with the academic world. In light of friends’ horror stories of being told to quit their extracurriculars and sports or stop seeing friends in order to get on top of their work, I’m not surprised that people don’t feel comfortable going straight to someone whose role is primarily making sure they’re attending all their contact hours and checking over their supervision reports.

“Many sources of solutions are constantly intertwined with our studies in a way that can make it difficult to see them as open opportunities for honest discussion”

Ultimately, assessments of academic progress should not be tied up with check-ins about students’ personal and mental wellbeing. Yet at Cambridge, it seems many sources of solutions are constantly intertwined with our studies in a way that can make it difficult to see them as open opportunities for honest discussion, and the normalisation of this only closes down the opportunities students actually feel for speaking about their mental health. Instead, if freshers are told they can go straight to a wellbeing officer or University counsellor, someone separate to the studies which are often the root of their worries, they might be less likely to fall at the first hurdle when asking for help, and could stop a small problem becoming a long-term issue.

Students are already suffering from a ‘workload crisis’, and following the rejection of calls for a reading week despite the University’s acknowedgement of a “culture of overwork”, it feels like our reliance on equally overworked academics is contributing to the spiralling mental health crisis we face. It seems as though the offer of a cup of tea and a biscuit, although it never hurts, isn’t going to be sufficient on its own.

Reeling off a long list of ‘ports-of-calls’ to convince incoming freshers, or even applicants, that Cambridge is a place where layers of safety nets are ready to catch you may be misleading. It alarmingly contrasts the hopelessness clearly experienced by many students about where to turn when they feel overwhelmed, overworked and isolated – and without changes to make this superficial structure a real support network, the state of students’ wellbeing will simply keep spiralling.