Your mental health can be incredibly hard to manage in the day-to-day and is especially difficult while adjusting to uni life.
As an international student, I felt terribly lonely during my first year at uni, leading me to feel unmotivated and depressed. These feelings eventually culminated in me reaching out to the King’s College London SSPP Wellbeing Team. During my session, my advisor assured me that many students have the same issues that I do and recommended that I register for the King’s Counseling and Mental Health Support Services. This had a super easy registration service and I only had to wait a few days before they got back to me to schedule an appointment.
This service made my life so much easier! I loved the therapist they assigned to me and found the five free sessions that were allocated to me extremely useful and productive. When my second to last session rolled around, I knew I still wanted to receive counseling services. I ended up registering for the NHS talking therapy which took about a month for them to respond. I was able to email and call the team to arrange my appointments after I took my qualifying survey. These sessions were also a very positive experience that I am really appreciative of because I was able to also access these for free.
If you feel that you also want to reach out for help, here are some tips I learned from my experience:
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Don’t feel scared or ashamed to reach out for help!
Your mental health is just as important as your physical health and the health of anyone else. -
Check if your uni has free mental health resources if you don’t want to pay for a private therapist!
Lots of unis have trained professionals who want to help you and this allows you to try out different types of mental health help without having to waste money on a program that may not work for you. -
The NHS service takes much longer to respond, so don’t hesitate to reach out early!
The NHS has a notoriously long waiting list and you don’t want your state to worsen before you can actually book an appointment. -
If you are going to a new therapy service after completing a previous program, you may need to wait three months before registering again!
This is the standard for counseling at King’s and the NHS. I was only able to switch without the three month gap because I did monthly therapy sessions with King’s rather than more frequently. -
Always voice your needs!
Whatever program you are on should personally work for you and there’s no shame in switching to a different program or therapist.