Exams are here, stress is rising and thousands of students across this campus are quietly falling apart. 

In anticipation, I reached out to the Student Counselling Centre (SCC) to work on issues stemming from my chronic health problems. As I went through the process of trying to make an appointment with SCC, I found that it is so severely underfunded that it functions as a rationing system where there is roughly one counsellor for every 3,000 students. Right now, the SCC intake process looks like something out of 1997 — phone-only, once a week, Fridays at 2:30 p.m. Miss the window because you’re in class? Too bad. (It happened to me twice.) Don’t have 20 minutes to sit on hold? Again, too bad.

When I called on Oct. 10, only seven minutes after intake opened, I was already the 10th caller on hold. This was the seventh week of classes, not even midterms, and the line was already full.

Meanwhile, faculties like law, nursing and a few others pay out of their own budgets to reserve counsellors for their students. If you’re lucky enough to be in a well-funded faculty, you get almost immediate access. If you’re not, you enter the “general population” queue, where wait times stretch into months depending on your triage category — low, mild or critical.

I was told directly that if I was not a law student, my case, classified as “mild,” would not have been seen at all in the general pool. And, had I waited a few more weeks, even my faculty-funded counsellor would not be able to see me, and I would have been advised to look for off-campus support instead. If I were to join the general queue, I likely wouldn’t be seen until seven or eight months later. By then, a student who started with a mild struggle could snowball into something far more dangerous — academic decline, worsened depression or even suicidal ideation.

This isn’t hypothetical. This is exactly how the system works right now.

UMSU is trying to help change things by advocating, pushing for support, running student health coverage and promoting workshops. But advocacy only matters if the administration chooses to listen, and right now, there is no evidence of that.

The university loves to talk about mental health, but talk costs nothing. Instead of funding a real, accessible mental-health system, the administration has essentially offloaded responsibility onto faculties. That leaves the students who most need help — often first-generation immigrants, low-income, international students and those outside professional faculties — fighting over scraps.

If the administration truly cared about student well-being, mild cases would be seen quickly, before they escalate. Only low-severity cases should ever be waitlisted, and even then, making them wait until the next semester is unreasonable.

If the U of M wants to claim it supports its students, then it’s time to prove it. Fund the SCC properly. Eliminate the intake bottleneck. Stop forcing faculties to build their own mental-health safety nets.

If the only students getting timely counselling are those whose faculties can afford it, then this campus doesn’t have a mental-health system at all — it has a hierarchical system.