Stephen Fry, one of Cambridge’s most famous alumnus whose struggles with bipolar disorder and depression are well-known, once said: “One in four people, like me, have a mental health problem. Many more people have a problem with that”. Encapsulated within this statement is the stigma that remains attached to mental illness, especially depression, within society at large, even towards the archetypal ‘brilliant sophisticate’ Stephen Fry, who threw himself into activities like a true polymath while at Cambridge. From an outsider’s perspective, the legendary ‘Cambridge Lifestyle’ conjures up caricatured images of super-human students, breathlessly pursuing a kaleidoscope of endeavours from the worlds of music, sport and academia, seemingly all at once.

Yet stripping away the ‘super-human’ stereotype reveals that Cambridge’s prodigious pace often has an all-too-human cost. As revealed by ‘The Big Cambridge Survey’ of 2014, “almost half of students feel that dealing with stress and anxiety has become a problem in their student life” with 43 per cent of students feeling that “Cambridge had a negative impact on their mental health”, spawning a variety of disorders, including depression. Indeed, never before has the public been as aware of the dark influence of clinical depression as now. And happily this shift also appears to be mirrored within Cambridge. The President of Student Minds Cambridge (SMC), an organisation set up to assist student welfare, describes having seen a conversation about mental health “really open up”, with “people talking about it more” and “an increase in mental health coverage by the student press”. Discussing the trend of increasing awareness, CUSU’s Welfare Officer explains that “depression is probably the most known about” of all mental health issues, doubtless a far cry from Fry’s time.

However, making it possible to talk openly about depression is clearly only the first step in removing the stain of stigma which continues to afflict those who suffer from it. As one recently graduated medic describes, “while many of us are reasonably comfortable talking about mental health, we simply do not know how to deal with it practically”.

In this sense, one way in which Cambridge mirrors society at large is the under-funding of mental health services. All of those with whom I have corresponded on this topic have been as unanimous in asserting the “high quality” and “professional” care that the University Counselling Service (UCS) provides students as they were in stressing how “overstretched” and “underfunded” it was. One student currently undergoing a course of therapy through the UCS described it as “great” and “incredibly useful” but also “horrifically overstretched”. The UCS tends to run six-week courses described as “very useful” by the current CUSU Welfare Officer. Yet this same student had to wait “four to six weeks to get an appointment”. The NHS was likewise taking “another two to four months for any kind of therapy”. St Catharine’s College MCR Welfare Officer Charlotte Northrop concurred in saying that the “NHS services have long waiting times and poor communication”. Charlotte also notes that while university services are “well-advertised” and “good”, they are limited “to those students dealing with short-term problems”. And given that Cambridge terms last what can feel like a very long eight weeks, those with long-term mental health issues (like chronic depression) end up relying on their colleges the most.

The elephant in the room cannot be avoided forever: the “highly inconsistent provision” of the collegiate system. Although a cliché, the oft-maligned, idiosyncratic college system undeniably and by its very nature guarantees variation, and what the President of Student Minds Cambridge describes as “a huge disparity between colleges as to the kind of help you can access for mental health related matter.”

Beyond college chaplaincies and tutorial systems, only approximately a third of the University of Cambridge’s 31 colleges employ anyone devoted specifically to mental health. At the top of the list are Queens’ and St. Catharine’s, who both employ at least three mental health counsellors. Clare also employs several mental health advisors via the Mindfulness program. Likewise Selwyn, Trinity, Wolfson, Pembroke, Homerton and Emmanuel all employ at least one counsellor each. The Hill Colleges – Churchill, Murray Edwards and Fitzwilliam – all share one counsellor between them. All other colleges simply employ a college nurse and otherwise either direct students to their tutors, or to already overstretched university or public health services. Notably, Darwin, Clare Hall and Corpus Christi don’t even have nurses (though the latter has its own college counsellor whose training and experience a member of the JCR welfare team dubbed "much more valuable" than university counsellors). Which college you attend can clearly have a serious impact on the time you could expect to spend waiting for mental health care.

And even at those colleges that do provide “adequate” services, like St. Catharine’s, those services are “under-advertised”, whereas “long-term treatment services, which are mostly left up to colleges, are not generally so well advertised either”, as Northrop adds. An awareness of the existence of these services is surely essential, as those students searching for help from the overstretched NHS and university services could otherwise be accommodated by their college. Northrop highlights that those suffering from more serious forms of chronic depression, which hinders their motivation and organisation, need their colleges to step up to the plate in its pastoral role, rather than having to navigate a “labyrinthine NHS system” and a “counselling service not equipped to deal with long-term mental health problems.”

As for academics within colleges, CUSU’s Welfare Officer Poppy Logan notes how: “For every person in Cambridge who’s aware of the issues and works to make things better, there’s another academic, tutor, DoS, supervisor who don’t realise how much more inclusive or accessible their provision of expertise could be.” Similarly, the ‘Big Cambridge Survey’ reported over half of those surveyed as rating their tutorial support less than “OK to Excellent”, as explored by an investigation in this paper at the time. As proposed then, new tutors across colleges are now expected to undergo training, yet only “about thirty tutors across the university turned up” to the most recent session, according to Logan. However, as Poppy adds, academics should endeavour to “maintain awareness of student support documents” produced by the Disability Resource Centre (DRC), and more broadly consider the health and wellbeing of the minds they’re helping to expand.

On the whole, Cambridge does not have a problem with the quality of medical and counselling services offered, whether that’s in the form of nurses, advisors or counsellors at college and university level.

The question then, is not quality, but quantity.

Simply put, the university’s provisions for the treatment of depression do not currently accommodate the sheer number of Cambridge students who suffer from the condition and are seeking help for it. The colleges which make up the university owe this to their students, as it would seem that their problems are exacerbated by the academic pressure which Cambridge places upon them. The UCS needs more counsellors and to better advertise its mental health advisors so as to cut down the long waiting times which students face, despite the shortness of Cambridge terms. The colleges which fund the UCS already give a lot, but they should give more. This may sound unreasonably demanding, but surely it is worthwhile for one of the world’s richest educational institutions to invest a little more into caring for the minds of those upon whom its reputation relies.

Even if further funding remains an impossibility, then at the very least colleges should look to reform and co-ordinate together to create a standardised counselling service of their own, “a baseline of internal mental health support”, as the President of Student Minds Cambridge described it, so as to ensure inter-collegiate equality and less pressure upon the university’s ability to make provisions for those suffering from mental health issues. She adds that colleges need to advertise their mental health provisions in “an on-going process”, because “students would benefit from more frequent reminders”, knowing where to go within their college rather than having to actively research it themselves.

Thankfully a college model to be emulated exists in none other than Stephen Fry’s old college, Queens’. The college not only maintains counsellors, but a 24-hour support staff who care for students anonymously at any time. Those who are struggling with depression must remember that high-quality services to treat all forms of mental health issues are real and many, even though the waiting times could be better. Best then to conclude with the words of Stephen Fry, who told me to pass this message on to you:
“Most students – especially in these quite shockingly pressured times – will suffer from anxiety, dread, worry, confusion and self-doubt. I would never underestimate the power of those Bad Fairies to upset what we are always told should be the happiest days of our lives, but Depression ... Depression is a whole different order of dreadful. It sucks away all energy and hope.

“One [of] its most appalling evils is that it drags one away from the company of others and bids one to suffer silently and alone, when the best recourse is to seek others out and ask, unselfishly and hopefully, for companionship, solace, help. Besides your fellow students, Cambridge has chaplaincies, counsellors, mentors, tutors, deans and student guides to help you. If you are afflicted, don’t you even dare to be afraid to approach them. Say I sent you. So there.”