Therapy and mental health support

As of September 2023, the Therapy & Mental Health team are offering Social prescription. This is an approach that connects students to activities, groups, and services in the university environment and wider community, to help improve your health and wellbeing.

Social prescription has been proven to help:

• Those who have challenges with physical health
• Those who have challenges with mental health
• Those who are lonely or isolated
• Those who want to increase control and be more proactive over their health and lives

We are continuing to evolve our projects and are always open to suggestions but some existing projects include: Solent gym memberships, sports clubs, nature projects and volunteering roles.

If you are interested, please email therapy.mh@solent.ac.uk to find our more information!

We are very aware that a lot of students may remain in their home country while studying and may not be returning to the UK at this time.

We want to reassure you that our service and support remains available to you. However, due to jurisdictional matters relating to therapy/counselling delivery in different countries, it is important to clarify that our service is able to deliver the following support to students outside of the UK:

• Our triage call back service (to facilitate next steps in your support)
• Emotional and wellbeing listening appointments (including signposting to local services) via single session appointments, mental health appointments and where appropriate, some psychoeducational groups that we may deliver.

Where ongoing support or counselling is needed, the practitioner will discuss this with you and recommend contacting the local services to you in your country of residence to organise this.

Also, we will require additional information from you, along with requiring you to sign a statement of understanding on the limitations to what we can provide. Therefore, when you submit your self-referral form to the team, we will email your Solent University email address to request this additional information and statement, prior to offering you an appointment.

Confidentiality

We understand how difficult it can be to come and talk with someone and we take confidentiality very seriously. Your therapist/adviser will talk to you about confidentiality at your first appointment and will be able to answer any questions or concerns you may have. 

All Solent University counsellors, CBT practitioners, hypnotherapists and mental health advisers are based in the Therapy and Mental Health Team (TMHTeam) and use the same secure records system. This can mean that members of the TMHTeam can see if you are accessing any part of the therapy and mental health service and, if necessary and helpful to you, can access these records. All emails for the TMHTeam go through the therapy.mh@solent.ac.uk inbox, which is a confidential email that only the team have access to.

Information can be shared about you and your situation, if necessary, to you (for example, provision of evidence letters, liaison with other agencies with your consent) if you request and consent to this. Please discuss this with the TMHTeam worker or contact the team email if you need more information.

Information about you, your access of this service and the content of sessions is confidential other than in a limited range of circumstances:

Your attendance (only) to our service may be shared with relevant support services in Student Experience (eg, Access Solent, Student Hub, Funding Team, Student Achievement Team) if there is a valid reason for this to be confirmed. This is limited to information regarding attendance.

The TMHTeam would only share information about you and your situation beyond the TMHTeam without your permission when there is a reason why this had to be done; for example:

• If there was an immediate risk of harm to you or someone else.
• For a particular legal reason. It is important to note that if the University receives a formal request from the police, using the necessary documentation to permit/require this, University policy is that relevant information is disclosed.

In the event that information must be shared without your consent, it would be limited to the relevant issues. Unless there is a valid reason why this cannot be done, a member of the TMHTeam will try to discuss the situation with you and ensure you are aware of what might be shared and with whom.

All members of the TMHTeam work to the same high standard of confidentiality and are line-managed by the therapy and mental health team manager, who reports to the deputy head of student experience (wellbeing) in the student experience team. In line with our duty of care and the University safeguarding policy, these managers are updated about any significant risk issues.

Third parties

Occasionally the TMHTeam receives communications from third parties (eg, University staff, parents, friends etc). In this situation, we will not disclose any information without your consent, (including whether or not you are known to the TMHTeam) but we may listen to and advise the third party in general terms.  

Professional registration

All staff in the TMHTeam work within the relevant codes of ethics, professional standards or standards for conduct in line with their role, professional qualifications or registration. 

On occasion, we have practitioners in our service undertaking professional training to support their career development.

If you would like more information about the above please speak with your worker or email the team who will be happy to answer any questions you have.

Data Protection

Our service handles your personal data carefully under the terms of the General Data Protection Regulation. This means that:

• By submitting a self-referral form you consent to us processing this personal data in order for us to offer you an appointment.   
• You are able to withdraw your consent to process your personal data and can do so by contacting therapy.mh@solent.ac.uk. As accurate records are essential to the ethical practice of the therapy and mental health team, an outcome of withdrawing your consent is that we would be unable to work with you.
• We use your personal information to ensure you are eligible to use the service, to arrange the most appropriate support for you and to contact you.
• The information is held on a computer database and is held securely. All access to the database is password protected.
• We do not share the content of your sessions beyond our therapy and mental health service unless (i) you ask us to do so or (ii) there is a serious and imminent risk to your own or to others' safety, or when we are legally obliged to do so, or (iii) with your separate and clear consent.
• If you make a subject data access request to the University, we are legally obliged to share all records, including case notes, with the information management and compliance officer to enable this request to be processed. 
• You can request to see or have a copy of the personal data that the service holds on you. You can ask the team member you are working with about this - contact the service by email or contact the University's information rights team by email: information.rights@solent.ac.uk.
• We use data to compile anonymous statistics about the use of the service and for research purposes.
• Records are kept for a period of six years after graduation; after this time they are destroyed.

For more general information about the University's use of your personal information while you are a student, please see https://data-preferences.app.solent.ac.uk

You will be reminded of our confidentiality and record keeping policy when you have an initial appointment with us and you are invited to ask any questions about confidentiality at any point. You will be asked to sign a brief statement to confirm that you have been provided with information about confidentiality and the management of your data.

We aim to contact students within two working days of them submitting any form or email to us. If you have not heard back from us within two working days please email us at: therapy.mh@solent.ac.uk and a member of the team will contact you to discuss this.

Once the team has processed your form we will allocate you an appointment, based on your referral, with the most appropriate member of our team. We will sent you an offer of appointment via your Solent email and notify you via text if you have supplied us your mobile number and given us permissions to contact you via SMS. Please check your University email account regularly. If you have not heard from us within two working days, we recommend you check your junk email. 

Please email us at therapy.mh@solent.ac.uk where a member of the team will contact you to help you with this.

We aim to offer you an appointment for SST or with a mental health adviser within 10 working days. At peak times, or if you have limited availability, this may be longer.

Appointments for any ongoing blocks of therapy (counselling or CBT) can have waiting times of up to six weeks.

Please email us at therapy.mh@solent.ac.uk as soon as possible to cancel the appointment, letting us know if you would like rearrange this session and given us your availability to do this. A member of the team will then contact you to rearrange this (if appropriate).

No, your lecturer will not know you have accessed our service, unless you specifically request we share this information with them and give us consent to do so. You can read more about our Confidentiality policy in the section above on this page, including the limits to this.

While we can prepare letters, with your consent, to confirm your attendance at our service and, where appropriate, to share any content that feels helpful to you, we are very aware that some letters will provide stronger evidence if issued by your GP (or any relevant medical professional involved in your care). Therefore, we would always encourage you to speak with your GP/medical professional about any letters you require for evidence in support of any funding, accommodation, SFE, EC or DSA applications.

Any content provided in our letters can only relate to the time period in which we supported you in the service, we are not able to comment on any circumstances/situations prior to this.

If you are not happy with the service you have received from us, we really want to hear about this. In the first instance, please contact the therapy and mental health manager by email: susan.lory@solent.ac.uk.