Universities must tackle suicides

Makerere University should address the cases of suicide, including of students jumping off to death from balconies, or found dead in their rooms. In the past years, the university has witnessed cases of students jumping off to their deaths from balconies of private hostels, University Hall, Mary Stuart Hall, or being found dead in their bedrooms as happened in Nsibirwa Hall only three days ago.
And these incidences are not limited to Makerere University, but they cut across several other universities and other institutions of higher learning.

Clearly, these students take their own lives, most likely because of emotional and mental breakdown and lack of counselling support. This means they fight alone and no one comes their way to help them manage and avert the crisis they face and finally end their lives.
Sadly, For Makerere, these self-destruction cases happen even as the university asserts it has functional students’ counselling services. But contrary to the university’s stance, it is shocking that even a fourth year student at the university is unaware that such services exist, or are operational.

This disconnect between the students’ opinion and those of university administration can only mean one thing; that the counselling services are dysfunctional or dead. Yet, counselling helps students cope with personal, academic, and external issues that impact their lives.
In sum, Makerere University should revive and get up and running its students counselling services because the current arrangement seems dead. There is, therefore, an urgent need to reactivate its free and confidential counselling services as key components of its operations.

Makerere could start by incorporating talks on students counselling services as part of essential activities during its orientation week.
Thereafter, the counselling services should be frequently flagged and made readily available to all students in distress, including for those who fail to make or maintain relationships. These services can be rolled out in several forms, including as brief drop-in and individual counselling sessions, issue-focused groups, and even as mediation groups.
These could be daily sessions conducted on first-come first-serve basis, or as longer-term support through groups sharing and tackling issues with others in similar situations.

These approaches can be very useful ways of reassurance that others care, or that one is not alone, but others as well suffer similar afflictions. Also holding frequent workshops on specific subjects of common interests to students, including handling the various demands of life at university, can be very useful in offsetting some of the stresses.
Other alternative accesses could be through online students’ counselling registration forms. This provides in advance basic information about the student and their concerns before seeing a counsellor. These options can help Makerere and other universities to tackle cases of suicides.