One of the chants on a #UCUstrike picket is “our working conditions - your learning conditions!” This is true of lots of teaching: if staff are on precarious contracts, not paid for prep time, not given enough time for marking, overloaded with admin, our students suffer.

It’s true of research. Going to conferences, going to archives, writing our own work makes us better teachers. Talking to colleagues in our field at other universities (because we ARE colleagues, not competitors) makes us better teachers. If we can’t do this, our students suffer.

(We are expected to be research active — indeed, we are really only able to gain promotion through research and publications — but given very little financial support or time for this and told not to, for example, rearrange classes to attend a conference in term time)

But another area where this is true is MENTAL HEALTH. There has been so much reporting on the mental health crisis among students. But there is a mental health crisis, exacerbated by an overwork crisis, among staff too. And we can’t support students if we can’t support ourselves.

When I meet colleagues from other institutions and we talk about teaching pressures, we always talk about student mental health. Our universities don’t have the resources to cope. But neither do we, as individuals. We get no support, and have no *time* to properly help students.

A student appearing in your office with a mental health crisis is an emergency. It means you drop everything to help. You talk, and listen. You try to direct them to support & to put structures in place to support them. Of course we need to do this. But it’s exhausting, and hard.

We WANT to help students (although it would be nice to get some recognition from our employers that this can be traumatic to us, too). And we are so overworked, we have so much else on our to-do lists, that a single student crisis can throw off the whole week.

So when I read another piece of journalism about lecturers letting down students with mental health crises, I’m frustrated: yes, students are suffering, but it is our *institutions* are letting them down (plus the NHS should provide mental health support for ALL young people).

TL;DR: the university is broken and it’s slowly breaking its staff and its students, too.