Mental health advice
Student Mental Health Advisers can offer support to students who may be experiencing emotional or psychological distress or personal difficulties. The Mental Health Adviser will coordinate support for you and act as a point of contact for the duration of your studies, providing interventions, offering advice and guidance and signposting/referring to therapeutic and external services when appropriate. The mental health adviser works alongside the disability service and counselling service, but it is not their role to be a counsellor.
Book an appointment with a Mental Health Adviser here.
What is a Mental Health Adviser?
To request an initial appointment with a Student Mental Health Adviser, you can complete the first appointment form.
Following your initial contact with the service, you will be invited to attend a one-to-one meeting with a member of the team. We currently offer appointments via phone, online video meeting or in person.
We understand that confidentiality is especially important, as it enables people to feel they can talk freely about their concerns in a safe environment.
The Student Mental Health Advisers will not pass on personal information about students (including information on attendance) to anyone outside the service (including academic staff). However, there are very few occasions when we would consider it necessary to break confidentiality.
These are:
- When you have given us your consent to disclose information.
- If we believed you were in serious danger of harming yourself or another person.
- Where we have been given information, which would render us liable to civil or criminal court procedure, should it not be disclosed.
In such situations, we would normally encourage you to disclose the information to the relevant person/agency. If there is no indication that this has happened, or is likely to happen, or if the crisis or danger is sufficiently acute, the Student Mental Health Adviser may pass on the information directly.
Consent to disclose information will be sought from the student, if possible.
Service record-keeping
When you contact the service, an electronic record is created. The purpose of this is to record your contact with the service and appointments with your Student Mental Health Adviser.
This is held securely in electronic form in line with the University’s records retention policy.
For more information, please see the University Records Management pages.
Access to records
Under the GDPR rules, you have the right to see records that are kept about you. For information on how to access your record please see GCU's Data Protection pages.
We also provide resources for staff to support your learning and student experience at GCU at our Teaching Students with ill mental health pages.
You can contact our mental health advisers by emailing mentalhealthadviser@gcu.ac.uk.