Banning students from going home for Christmas will be a mental health fiasco.
But, it’s about framing. If we go into a second lockdown, it won’t be banning students from going home for Christmas – it’ll be banning all unnecessary travel, again, and it’ll be about how we judge what is and isn’t necessary. It’s also highly unlikely, but I’m here to give you my opinion on a hypothetical anyway.
At a glance, it seems like us frivolous university students shouldn’t be able to go home. It’s a luxury! We’re the ones driving the numbers up by returning to university campuses and trying to have fun in what is a lifetime first for us all. We deserve this punishment! No Christmas dinner for us!
This is because we fail to prioritise student mental health. Or anyone’s mental health. The government and universities have encouraged us to move back to campus, pocketed the rent money and then locked the door behind many first-year students. The students who are participating in house parties are being taken as the rule, rather than the exception, and students at large are branded with the “IRRESPONSIBLE” stamp that the Tory government have been waving around like a feather duster.
what are the odds that the government will lift lockdown rules around christmas to take our money again and then blame us for not adhering to the rules 3 weeks later? taking bets here people
— STEPH ✨ (@itsstephtoms) September 22, 2020
Travelling home for Christmas is necessary because spending times with other human beings is our right: social interaction and time with loved ones is a contributing factor to our mental health. According to the United Nations, Article 25 of the Human Rights charter states that “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family”. Forgive me if I’m being too liberal with my interpretation of this, but mental health falls under the realm of wellbeing, does it not?
The problem here is that for a long time, the Conservative government have been tricking us into believing that this is untrue. Cuts to mental health care and a complete disregard for an individual’s right to good mental health has become normal. We don’t view it as necessary. We’ve allowed it to get this bad. We talk in platitudes about mental health: simpering lines about checking up on your friends and not being mean to each other. This is bullshit.
Throughout this entire Coronavirus lockdown, there have been a few people who have piped up about the obvious adverse mental health effects related to extended isolation, but they were summarily squished by Boris monologuing about the need to prioritise saving the economy.
Students, in particular, are prey to issues with their mental health, especially right now. Having been denied the closure of celebrating the end to almost fourteen years in formal education, many of them lost their jobs during lockdown. Lots of companies won’t hire students because we’re seen as flaky or unreliable. If they do hire us, it’s often as part of the service industry, and the battering we’ve taken there hasn’t been spoken about enough. I’m lucky enough to work in a supermarket, but it took me over fifty job applications to get there. I didn’t want to risk returning to Wetherspoons for work – not when I saw how excited people were to start drinking once lockdown started to lift, and what that might lead to.
….. literally cannot believe they are considering stopping students being able to go home and celebrate Christmas with their families?
like…. what?
i mean shut the pubs, take extra measures, but that is actually cruelhttps://t.co/B327FCVGKw
— eve (@evebennettx) September 24, 2020
Without the pre-existing stress of moving away from home, struggling to make friends and keep up academically, students are now facing being disallowed from socialising outside of their flats, the sports they can participate in have been reduced significantly, and making friends in lectures is almost entirely out of the question. If I’d had to isolate with my first year flat and no one else, I would’ve probably done something drastic (they’re all lovely people, but I lived with a couple, imagine the horror).
If we must learn anything from this week’s panic about being banned from going home for Christmas, it’s that at this point, many universities do simply exist as businesses that operate to take student’s money. Encouraging students back with online mingles and the offer of free Domino’s pizza to collect extortionate amounts of rent and fees that mostly don’t go to our lecturers is highly irresponsible.
Realistically, unless the government were to lock down the country again and send out police officers to stop everyone from making unnecessary journeys, banning students from going home for Christmas as a concept seems to exist to increase the scapegoating we’re already getting for literally doing what universities have told us to do.
When this idea was originally floated, before Gavin Williamson confirmed that the government was “going to work with universities to make sure that all students are supported to return home safely and spend Christmas with their loved ones, if they choose to do so”, the tone of headlines was full of reproach. Silly students. Yes, we told you to return to university. Yes, we took your rent money and thought a ‘blended approach’ to learning would keep you quiet. But what did you expect? You’re piggy banks to us. Not human beings at an incredibly stressful and turbulent point in your lives. No Christmas dinner for you.
Maddy Raven
Photo by Michał Parzuchowski on Unsplash. Image license can be found here. No changes were made to this image.
