I am a Research Fellow based in the NIHR MindTech Medtech Co-Operative research group in the School of Medicine, University of Nottingham. Mindtech is a national centre focusing on the development, adoption and evaluation of new technologies for mental healthcare and dementia. I works on projects relating to evaluating digital technologies for children and young people’s mental health. One of my main interests lies with using digital technologies to support university students’ mental health – for example, how online programmes may be used by universities and counselling services to support their students’ mental health. 

​Generally, men are more reluctant to seek mental health support than women. These findings remain consistent across younger adults and particularly university students. Thus, male students are a particularly vulnerable group. To overcome this, my PhD is centred around developing an intervention for male university students aiming to improve their willingness to seek psychological support. Over the next 3 years, I plan to identify key features within interventions that may encourage male students to seek mental health support, collaborate with male students to help develop an appropriate/feasible intervention, and to lastly pilot this intervention with male students at KCL.

Ilyas Sagar-Ouriaghli, NIHR PhD Student, King’s College London 
Contact: ilyas.sagar-ouriaghli@kcl.ac.uk

Medical cultural anthropology
​While studying veterinary medicine in France, I developed a strong interest in medical anthropology, based in an understanding that the health and disease of humans and other animals are constructed, debated and politicised notions. This is why, after my training as a veterinarian epidemiologist, I further explored the social dimensions of global public health issues and interventions. This was done through a project in Thailand, researching village-based social networks around poultry disease surveillance. I then worked on worldwide knowledge flows in collaborative research on Nipah virus (a virus transmitted to people by bats) for my master’s degree in Science Policy.

​Universities are starting to run surveys to monitor the wellbeing of their student populations. These are powerful resources that will enable us, in time, to test whether student mental health is changing. For example, whether a current cohort of students are more likely than previous ones at a particular institution to be anxious or depressed. The data could also be used to track student trajectories as they progress through their university years, allowing interventions to be targeted at times and groups of greatest need.

"But we’re lecturers, not therapists!”

​In my area of work, I encounter this objection on a fairly regular basis and my response is always the same. Trying to turn lecturers into therapists is not my goal; this would be neither effective as teaching nor therapy. I have now come to expect, accept and understand the reasons behind this misplaced fear. I even enjoy encountering this response, as it opens up a space in which to discuss ‘how things are done around here’ and to revisit our objectives as educators.

To ensure student mental health research is focused on the issues that matter to students, it is crucial that students themselves have an active rather than passive involvement in research. As such, our research project was participatory in nature, putting myself and three other Royal Holloway students with lived experiences at the centre of the research, under the guidance of Dr Eilidh Cage. 

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I am a clinical psychologist by training and am interested in the individual and societal impact of disordered eating (principally, eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge-eating disorder). These illnesses are characterised by disturbances in eating behaviour and are associated with high levels of functional impairment and comorbidity with other mental disorders.

As a first year PhD student, jointly funded by the ESRC and MRC, I examining how financial, sociodemographic, and university-related factors may be associated with the mental health of students. In particular, I will measure students’ financial situation, including amount of debt, income, and stress about their finances; demographic variables such as ethnicity and sexual minority status; and characteristics of the university experience such as degree subject, accommodation type and workload.  ​I will look at the relationship between these variables and symptoms of depression and anxiety, and the consequences on academic and help-seeking outcomes. 

SMaRteN has just announced its first funding call. We’re looking to support researchers in answering the question what is distinctive about student mental health?
 
Give it a little thought and you’ll soon find that there are many ways of interpreting this question and many methods that could be applied to answering it. In this blog post, I’d like to talk about one way of looking at the problem – through the lens of economics.
 
Economics is about understanding how people and organisations make decisions, and what the consequences of those decisions might be. Often, this comes down to weighing up the costs and benefits of alternative courses of action. Here are just a few examples of the types of questions that get economists thinking.

​Many staff members at universities are likely to have come across the ‘Perfectionist Student’, or even, the ‘Procrastinating Student’: too fearful to start or submit work they do not believe is ‘good enough’ because it is not quite ‘perfect’. These students frequently struggle with high levels of worry and anxiety and are repeatedly failing to reach their potential because of their over-reliance on achieving their high standards and maladaptive coping strategies.