Student Mental Health Profiling: Using Data for a Whole University Approach to Mental Health and Wellbeing Support

Higher Education policy such as the University Mental Health Charter (UMHC) encourage the promotion of ‘Whole University’ approaches to support students. This paper synthesises literature from studies in student mental health, counselling and support services and emerging educational technologies, to investigate how data analytics may enable such an approach. This research suggests that proactively targeting and personalising support can be a complementary approach to traditional reactive service models which rely on students independently identifying support routes. Given there is already increased demand for support services, university counselling and mental health teams require a mechanism to anticipate support needs in advance of intervention. The paper offers an inaugural definition for Student Mental Health Profiling (SMHP) as the analysis of relevant big datasets to meaningfully group students. Whilst datasets derived from clinical tools dominate diagnoses, this study suggests that the WHO-5 screener may be better suited to SMHP especially if collected regularly.