Hi my name is Abi I'm a psychological practitioner within the University's
mental health and wellbeing team. I'm going to be talking today about the services available to you
while you're at university that support you with your mental health
and well-being. It's been a strange few months for everybody and I know lots of people have
struggled with different aspects of the Covid 19 pandemic and therefore I think maybe even more so
now than ever it's important to know what service available to you and how to access them. So we'll
start with the mental health and wellbeing team. We consist of psychological practitioners
and counsellors. Us psychological practitioners support students who are struggling with things
such as stress, anxiety, sleeplessness, low mood we offer a space to talk but we also
offer you strategies and tools and techniques to help you manage what it is that you're going
through. Counsellors work with students who have been through some kind of difficulty
in their life whether that's a past event or something recent and it's impacting on their
mental health they offer a space for you to explore your thoughts feelings behaviors maybe
what it is that you've been through if that feels right in order to help you process and move
through what it is that you're struggling with and hopefully make the most of your time at university.
Both the psychological practitioners and the counsellors offer a non-judgmental
safe and confidential space so what you talk to us about in your sessions
stays confidential to student services we don't share the information or even the fact
that you're registered with us with anybody else inside or outside the uni without your permission.
To register with us you go to the student internet pages and find the your well-being page
there you'll find a link that says personalised support. Fill in the registration form
read the information that comes through to us and then we allocate you to either counselling
or psychological practitioners. Everything that we're doing at the moment is online so we're
using platforms such as zoom and Skype for Business in order to support you and we also
offer an email service. We hope to support you face to face as soon as we can but we have to
wait until that's safe for everybody. We offer groups and workshops and we'll get those rolling
once the academic term has started so keep an eye on the website for information about those
On the website as well you'll also find loads of resources to support your well-being so
we've got Canvas courses, self-help guides, loads of recommendations for apps and websites that you can
check out all to support you with your well-being. If you're a student who has a diagnosis of either
a physical or a psychological condition have a look at the student disability website as well
because it might be that you'll benefit from registering and getting some support
from them. Other services to support you you've got your wellbeing officers
so they're going to support you with any academic or well-being related difficulties, we've got the
Pause service they offer on the day mental health support and they're available Monday to Friday
the chaplaincy supporting students of all faiths, we've got Student Mentors if you're in university
accommodation and of course you've got the Guild and Nightline who are there to support you as well.
So lots of internal support for you. As well as the stuff that you've got
on campus and within the university there's external support that you can access as well
so your GP is a really good first port of call and if you register with mental health and well-being
we do ask you to be registered with a GP so if you're new or you haven't registered yet
it's probably a good idea to do that. Your GP can help you with your mental health and they
can also refer you to external services so in Birmingham that might be Forward Thinking
or Birmingham Healthy Minds. If you're living elsewhere within the UK your GP will be able to
direct you to more local services as well. There are other telephone support services or online
services such as Samaritans, Kooth, Papyrus again all of this information is on the website so pop
along to the web pages and familiarise yourself with the information that's there. If you're a
student in Dubai then you have your own well-being officer again the information's on the
website and students who are studying abroad or living abroad have access to the local university
or your Study Abroad team and we'll work with our partners as best we can to support you. Your mental
health and well-being is super important to us we don't want you to be struggling along alone so if
you find yourself having any kind of difficulties find yourself struggling then get in touch
register with us and use the support available to you okay. Take care, thanks for listening