Abstract
BackgroundUniversity students often experience numerous financial, social and emotional stressors that can affect their mental health. The Peer Support Centre (PSC) is a pilot project that was established to provide peer support to students in these stressful conditions. We wanted to investigate whether peer support is a viable form of support that would benefit university students. The objective of this study is to determine whether the organization was indeed providing a beneficial service to students and if it was fulfilling the needs of the students that visited the service.MethodsAfter a support session, students and peer support providers completed an anonymous questionnaire regarding their self-reported mental wellbeing using the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7) metrics, and Outcome Rating Scale (ORS). They were also asked about their experience with previous professional mental health services as well as their experience at the PSC. With the data collected from 1043 students and 797 volunteers from September 2016–March 2020, a program evaluation was conducted for quality improvement purposes.ResultsThe PSC is used by students of different sexes, genders, and ethnicities. Students reported having a low ORS score, moderate anxiety as per the GAD-7 and moderate depression according to the PHQ-9. They find it easy to use and rely on it as an alternative form of support when they approach barriers that prevent them from accessing professional services. Lastly, the peer support providers feel very validated in their role and overall quite prepared and helpful when helping their fellow peers.ConclusionsThe establishment of a student service that provides peer support would be beneficial to the members of a university/college campus.
Highlights
University students often experience numerous financial, social and emotional stressors that can affect their mental health
A support session is a safe space in which the student can talk about anything that is on their mind to a peer support provider who will actively listen in an empathetic, non-judgemental and non-directional manner
The Peer Support Centre (PSC) serves a wide range of students throughout the school year From September 2016 to March 2020, the PSC provided a total of 1164 support sessions with 950 questionnaires being completed, representing a response rate of 81.6% (Additional file 3: Table S1)
Summary
University students often experience numerous financial, social and emotional stressors that can affect their mental health. The reluctance to seek professional services can be attributed to the stigma surrounding mental health issues, low perceived need for help, lack of time, lengthy wait times or waitlists, privacy concerns, or the hierarchical and illness-based approach conducted by clinicians [6, 12,13,14,15,16]. Services that provide peer support can serve as an alternative source of informal support for university students due to it being free of cost and conveniently situated on-campus [17, 18]
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