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Institutional anxiety, unrealistic expectations around risk, and a corrosive undermining of clinical work… University counsellors are under huge pressure, argues psychoanalytic psychotherapist Alan Percy, and the emphasis on waiting lists is both compounding the problem and missing the point. As we mark University Mental Health Day 2023, the former Head of Counselling Service at University of Oxford considers dynamics at play in the university sector, including media attention around suicides – and speaks up for the vital role and proven value of short-term student counselling.

Single sessions are one way of responding to the intensifying demand for student counselling. To mark University Mental Health Day, Dr Windy Dryden sets out the case for offering them, outlines the characteristics of the all-important ‘single-session mindset’, and suggests there may be more to this approach than simply reducing waiting lists.