How To Best Look After Your Mental Health While At University

We’ve teamed up with the thought leaders at ANU to take a look at some Australians doing big things.

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After the amniotic waters of high school, university can come as a slap to the face. Changing towns to co-exist with thousands of strangers, figuring out how to be an adult within the space of a few months, and trying to make those friends everyone says you’ll know for ever — all while attending the occasional lecture — can be terrifying. With all this hitting you at the most psychologically vulnerable stage of life, your alone-time thoughts can be brutal. Especially if you have no idea what to do with them.

This is the systemic isolation youth mental health organisation Batyr is working to combat. Named after Kazakhstan’s legendary ‘talking elephant’, Batyr is determined to “give a voice to the elephant in the room” by training young people who have lived with mental illness and sending them to schools and universities to get people talking about their experiences. While one in four people will develop a mental health disorder between the ages of 15 and 25, just under a third of young people who are experiencing mental illness actually seek help.

By educating and empowering them, Batyr hope to make the tricky road to seeking help easier. Because loitering around the counselling office just don’t cut it, as founder Sebastian Robertson knows well.

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Struggling in Silence

To everyone else, Sebastian was winning at life after moving from Sydney to study a double degree in commerce and economics at ANU in Canberra. As well as debating hot topics with academics and peers, he also wielded a nice amount of power as president of John XXIII Residential College. But he felt awful.

“That was my best and worst year,” says Sebastian of his presidential year in 2007. “I was dealing with quite severe depression that I refused to acknowledge. If you had a mental illness it was pretty much deemed a weakness. So I avoided it because I didn’t want to be a weak leader.”

After losing control one night and ending up in a paddy wagon, Sebastian knew it was probably time to get help. But he kept it quiet.

“I got support, but no one knew about it. I made it through the year, which was amazing for me. The huge achievement was that I survived.”

Looking back after graduation, Sebastian wished he’d sought help sooner or, at the very least, heard from someone who’d gone through the same thing.

So he returned to John XXIII College to share his story with others like him, and the idea for Batyr was born. In 2010, Sebastian promptly quit his cushy finance job at General Electric to set up the non-profit organisation. He was by then a pretty precocious 25-year-old.

“I recognised there was a huge opportunity to lead the charge and set up a platform that enabled young people to learn how to use their story of recovery through mental illness as a tool for change.”

Five years later, Batyr has 120 volunteer speakers and has reached over 14,000 young people at secondary schools and universities through their Being Herd programs – getting that help-seeking rate to over 70 per cent. They’ve also united with ANU and John XXIII College to set up a gruelling (but apparently excellent) ‘Civic to Surf’ fundraising relay run from Canberra to Bondi.

Sebastian has picked up a ton of youth leadership and entrepreneur awards for Batyr, and even made it to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth as part of an Australian Youth Delegate in 2011.

“I had completely misjudged the impact that it would have,” he says of Batyr, which has become a pretty noisy elephant in the last five years. “I still get people who heard some of my early talks connect with me on Facebook or by email, sharing their stories about how they were absolutely struggling while I was talking.

“They felt like I was telling their story, but the biggest difference was that they weren’t seeking help. Me sharing that story of help-seeking enabled them to go and do the same thing.”

Now, those people are Batyr speakers. “The storytelling model is working so well at the moment and it’s just amazing to step back to see.”

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How To Find Help In the Ivory Tower

Sebastian says mental illness spikes around transitional periods in life. For most people, university counts as a pretty freaking huge transition.

“It’s all about your own motivation,” says Sebastian. “The lecturers are just there to lecture, the tutors are just there to tutor. They’re not there to emotionally support you through life. It’s not a bad thing or a good thing, it’s just the way it is.”

This is where implementing a personal ‘mental health first aid kit’ becomes so important, especially in times of prolonged anxiety or stress.

“You have to recognise when that anxiety or pressure is inhibiting your ability to function on a daily basis, for a prolonged period of time.

“Once you recognise those things, you need to think about some tools or behaviours you’re going to implement. So if you like to go for a run, go for a run. If you like to read something read a book, watch a TED talk. Whatever it might be, just have something you can pull out from your mental health first aid kit that can support you.”

Sebastian hopes to see universities doing more to support the mental health of students, and has partnered Batyr with ANU to deliver services across campus.

“Students that are looking to go to university should really investigate what universities are doing to support students on wellbeing – it’s a viable question they should ask the university.

“I think as soon as students ask it universities have to start responding, and I think ANU is a great example of a university being ahead of the game.”

While he’s stepped back as Batyr CEO to enter the renewable energy sector (watch out, windmill haters), Sebastian’s dream is to see a country where the important stories are being told, from student to student.

“I would love to see an old student from every school going back and sharing their stories and facilitating a peer program across all schools, across Australia.

“I think that no student should miss out on this.”

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Find out more about Batyr here. If you suffer from depression, you can reach Lifeline 24 hours a day  on 13 11 14.

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Megan Anderson is a Melbourne-based freelance journalist and online editor for Going Down Swinging.

Feature image by Hakan Caglav for Getty.