Interviewing Van Tran

- Head of Counselling at NTU

5th January 2015

During my interview with Jenny, she recommended I should speak to someone from the counselling team at NTU for some more primary research. I wanted to interview a healthcare professional regarding stressed students and their general wellbeing, so I chose to contact the head of counselling at NTU. I wanted to find out what they suggest to distressed students who approach them, and how the University's support teams actually help.

What are your particular responsibilities as head of counselling at Trent?

V: There are two roles, I’m here to manage the counselling service but also I do clinical work, so I’m split between management and clinical work. In terms of managing the service, the service is to provide free counselling for all students. We run a brief counselling service, as it’s time limited in the sense that we offer four to six sessions to students rather than two years, etc. So, it’s quite focused work, it’s to support students with their emotional or psychological difficulties that they may be having.

What kind of support is available here within counselling?

V: Well, most of our work is a one-to-one, sitting here in these meeting rooms… It’s one-to-one work across all three campuses. We also offer some group workshops which are psycho-educational, so they might teach you about a stress management technique, and we run some of those each term. We also do online counselling for students that either can’t or don’t wish to see someone face to face, for example they might be away… The online counselling can either be in the form of an email exchange which is rather like letter writing (or the technical term is asynchronous), or it could be done through instant messaging, and sometimes we work through Skype as well. So we do mostly individual work, mostly face to face, but some of it is online.

Do you cover near enough every kind of problem students may come here with?

V: Yeah, well basically we are trained and experienced to deal with a whole range of problems, so it might be from ‘I’m having trouble with my housemates’ or ‘I’ve broken up with someone’ or ‘I’m not getting on with a parent’ or something to the other end of things which might me ‘I want to tell someone for the first time that I was sexually abused as a child’. So it’s the whole spectrum you can imagine of human experience, plus, the usual university things like work pressure, home sickness, or that kind of thing. So it could be a whole spectrum of difficulties. If something is of a very severe nature we don’t just say ‘oh well, all you’re going to get is the four or six sessions’, we do try to facilitate a referral elsewhere for specialist help. And the reason that we can’t offer that more in-depth longer term help is a resource issue basically. If we saw a few students for a very long time, there would be a whole load of students we wouldn’t see at all.

What’s the most common problem students bring to your attention?

V: Anxiety followed by depression.

Me: Ok, so does one normally lead to the other?

V: They’re often related, but one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other. Often if you do have anxiety you do get depressed, or sometimes you get anxious because you’re depressed. Anxiety is the biggest one and depression is the next biggest by far. It’s very common across the sector, it’s not unique to NTU in terms of the psychological helping sector, and anxiety and depression are the big ones.

What time of year do students mainly seek help from counselling? Is there some kind of pattern you’ve noticed or is it just spread all over the year?

V: It’s an interesting question because up until last year I would have said we have a slow start at the beginning of the academic year, but last year and this year, that’s not been the case… we’ve started quite quickly. In fact, sometimes people have been saying ‘I’m coming to University for my first year, I’ve had some problems, and can I have some help when I arrive?’ So, we start pretty much at the beginning of the academic year and then it builds up. There’s a spike in demand just before and just after Christmas. There’s deadlines, and also for a lot of people Christmas is not necessarily a really happy time. That kind of demand is kind of mirrored in the outside world, so it’s not just necessarily a student thing. Relate, the Relationship Counselling Organization, may have a peak in demand just after Christmas as well. So often with big cultural festive occasions, family difficulties come out as well, so it’s not an NTU specific but we do have an increase in demand around about before and after Christmas and the

demand just stays high. Then it drops off a bit as exams start. There’s post-Christmas stuff that people need to talk about, then there might be deadlines and pressures, and all that kind of thing.

But then as the exams come, people need to prioritize where they need to be as in ‘Am I attending the exam or am I going to counselling?’ and often they go to the exam obviously. We do provide a service all year round, so then demand does drop away but there are quite a few students who either live in Nottingham or international students who don’t go home, so we have a year-round service but there are fewer staff on vacation times.

Do many students come looking for advice on how to cope with stress in terms of bulk of work and things like that?

V: In terms of managing their work, we sort of do, but we’re not here to kind of practically help people manage things. People often come stressed by their work but we’re not really the right place to help people organize their work.

What do you think are the main causes of stress at University? Is it a lot to do with being home-sick or is it the actual work load?

V: I think it’s hard to be specific. There may be some people who are home-sick, some people find the transition of work they might have done at school to ‘uni’ quite a big leap in terms of being more self-directed with learning. Some people don’t have very heavily time-tabled courses and might find that difficult to structure their own time. I can’t really say that there is one particular demand, because that demand could shift across the year depending on what’s happening.

It’s been proven than spending time with animals can be very helpful in reducing stress levels, so Trent have been providing students with a puppy room during exam periods to help them with their studies. What are your thoughts on this?

V: I think it’s a good thing! I can’t produce the evidence of the top of my head but I do know as you’ve said, there is evidence that interaction with animals can have a calming effect. It’s not just hear, research across psychology says it’s a useful thing to do. I think what’s important to understand is that one size doesn’t fit all in terms of what is helpful. Sometimes people find talking helpful, sometimes people find being with animals helpful, so it’s about finding the thing that personally helps you most.

A lot of students told me they wouldn’t use university counselling, that they would rather speak to friends and family instead. Do you think this is just as helpful or is it a problem that they don’t come to counselling?

V: I think talking to friends and family is the best thing to do at first, because counselling is just by its nature a few hours, but if you have good family and friendship relationships which are supportive to you where you can be supportive to others than that’s the best thing. It’s just that sometimes people need to come to talk to someone like a counsellor if they feel they can’t talk to the friends family or it might involve those friends and family or it might just be too embarrassing, shameful or upsetting and they might just want to disclose for the first time to someone who isn’t involved in their personal lives.

Do you think students feel better generally once they’ve shared their thoughts?

V: I’d say broadly speaking, yes.

Chaplain Jenny from the Wellbeing Centre said you get a much higher number of stressed students seeking help from counselling than they do over there, what kind of proportion of students do you see?

V: Within student support services, the counselling team as it is set up at the moment, see about 50% of students who use the support services. So it’s not to say that people don’t go elsewhere, as we sad earlier, they might find help through family or friends, so we don’t see all distressed students but proportionally we do see quite a lot.

When students come to you with a stress/anxiety problem, what measures do you recommend to them as a starting point to calming down?

V: I recommend our website resources (http://www.ntu.ac.uk/student_services/health_wellbeing/counselling/useful_info/index.html) and (http://www.ntu.ac.uk/student_services/health_wellbeing/counselling/podcasts/index.html). These links will be sent to a student when they first contact us. When I see them for the first time I would want to explore if they have put anything into practice yet. Also I would ask them about what they normally find helpful in terms of keeping calm and balanced. Sometimes it is about enabling people to reconnect with skills they already have in addition to or even instead of learning new ones.

Do you think yoga and meditation are beneficial for calming people down?

V: Absolutely. Again, there’s lots of evidence in the field that says that yoga and meditation are very helpful for a lot of people. Not everybody, as I said earlier, not everything suits everybody but I do think it’s a really important thing and there’s lots of research into mindfulness based meditation which is actually available for certain things through the NHS now. So it’s not regarded as fringe anymore, it’s an evidence-based treatment, as the NHS love to say. So, yes!

Do you think being at peace with your body and mind can affect students in their work? So, if they’re feeling calm does that reflect on how well they do in their exams for example?

V: I think the general answer is yes, again, there’s a lot of evidence to say that in order to perform you need a degree of stress. If we’re so laid back that nothing really matters at all, then we’re not going to move forward. So there’s always a fine tune between having enough stress to give us that drive and motivation, but not too much where it becomes a block.

If there were a new building created specifically dedicated to de-stressing students, what do you think would need to be provided? I’ve had general feedback which says people would like individual spaces as well as large rooms, etc.

V: I think a mixture of smaller and large spaces where people either have privacy or share space with others, so yes, I agree with that. I think the space itself needs to be inherently calm and quiet and hopefully the rooms need to be adequately sound-proof from outside noise. It’s a problem we have here actually, it can be quite calm in here, but if there’s something noisy going on out there it can be quite intrusive, so I think it needs to be an inherently quite environment, with good environmental control i.e. not too hot not too cold, good lighting, etc. Looking at this room, I tend to have these lights on (points to soft-light from lamps) because it softens the environment. If I put this main light on, it’s really bright and rather harsh. So, it’s important to be able to have an environment that’s conducive towards being calm and relaxed: heating, lighting, furnishings, etc.

There has been a lot of feedback coming from my questionnaires regarding the outdoor element i.e. bringing the outdoors indoors. Would it perhaps need to contain an indoor garden for example?

V: That would be great. Again. It depends how much money you have in your design budget. A lot of people find being connected with the natural environment inherently calming. So, yes.

What sort of building would you expect this new ‘calming space’ to be provided in? I.e. quite modern like the new SU, or in a church conversion, etc.

V: I think, a secular space. So, it wouldn’t be within a religious building, it could be in a former religious building, but in my own view, I think if it was identified with a religion some people might have problems with that so it might not be able to connect with everybody. So, a secular space, definitely. I don’t think it matters whether it’s in a modern building like the SU or a very ancient building, I think it’s about the feel of the building, the environmental conditions, and what the building provides. You could have a very beautiful modern building that does those things or you could have a really rubbish one that’s really cold and draughty and harshly lit. So I think the outside space should be trying to reflect what you’re aiming for with peoples inside space, if you see what I mean.

My interview with Van lasted approximately 20mins on this occasion. I have included the entire transcript here which has been approved and authorized to be published online.

Interviewing Revd J.

Current Page

Interviewing Van T.

Interviewing Student