“One in four people, like me, have a mental health problem. Many more people have a problem with that.”

So said Stephen Fry, one of Cambridge’s most famous alumni, and perhaps the most well-known to have suffered from a mental health condition. Thankfully, a raft of recurrent student-led campaigns and new student societies have consistently raised the visibility of mental health issues among the current student body to a level far higher than was seen in Fry’s time. Groups like the #endweek5blues campaign and Student Minds Cambridge continue to highlight the perennially high incidence of mental health problems among students, while movements like Destigmatise Sunday work to change the subtle linguistic cues of trivialisation that demean one of the most isolating medical conditions. Martha Perotto-Wills has already argued on this newspaper’s website that the same trivialisation results from the continued use of terms like “Week 5 blues”. A chocolate bar in your pigeon hole won’t cure depression, and the sooner we realise this, the more seriously we will begin to take our fellow students’ mental health problems.

But there is a bigger problem. One would think, given this continued emphasis, that student services were responding accordingly, especially when a 2014 CUSU survey revealed that almost half of respondents found dealing with stress and anxiety had become a problem in their student life. Unfortunately, Dermot Trainor’s investigation into this issue reveals a far darker reality.

As has been pointed out in this newspaper in various forms over the years, many things vary between colleges, from the provision of travel grants to the quality of tutorial support and the number of supervision hours. As this investigation makes clear, the disparate levels of support across colleges remain a significant problem.

But investigations should not just uncover the problems – they should also offer solutions. If examinations into welfare provision within the collegiate system simply continue to uncover the same expected disparities in a new domain without offering practical solutions as to how those problems can be tackled, those students who were brave enough to inform student reporters, survey-takers and campaigners of their struggles will continue to see those same struggles unaddressed. When the chorus grows loud enough, such conclusions descend into platitudes – and such platitudes become as commonplace as stash, swaps and Cindies, becoming as trivial as terms like “Week 5 blues”.

Instead, we need solutions. We hope this investigation, with its concrete proposals about basic cross-college welfare provisions and model colleges to follow, strikes a rather different tone.