Student mental health services and programs: access, information and offers on sites of federal higher education institutions

Abstract

The institutional websites of universities are important tools for students to access information regarding the institution. It is expected that the information distributed on the sites is easily accessible and contains complete information. Care for students' mental health is considered a very important subject, but little explored and/or invested. This study aims to problematize and discuss the student mental health services found through the information presented on the institutional websites of universities and to evaluate the ease of access to information. Eleven federal universities in the southern region of Brazil were chosen by convenience sample, being a qualitative research where the descriptive and interpretive method was used with the help of virtual ethnography for data construction. Throughout the research, it was noticed a difficulty in finding information about mental health support and complete information about the services studied. During the study, there was a question about the need to think about student mental health beyond the biomedical bias centered on cognitive difficulties and/or possible illnesses in the academic environment. There is an urgent need to create proposals for prevention and promotion of university mental health, expanding the fields of action of school psychologists.