Peer Support Line closure

By: Kieran Douglas

The McMaster Students Union has announced it will close the Peer Support Line after five years of use. It makes sense. The need for support lines and similar services is clear, but this specific peer-based line seemed unsuitable for the demand imposed on it.

A recent Silhouette article stated that more than half of calls made to the line had to do either with crisis situations or mental health. As the line was run by student volunteers, most listeners are hardly equipped to effectively deal with situations this complex.

Though the service was commendable in that students would volunteer and lend a hand to peers in need, no amount of good can substitute for the training of a professional counsellor, which is what the MSU should be looking to focus its funds on in order to better serve students. Conversely, this brings light to the present concerns to student mental health services on campus and presents the imminence of a need for better services the help students who are in need of support at McMaster.

For crisis cases and situations that are extremely time-sensitive and need the assistance of professionals, students can only help so much. In addition, there is the concern of the peer support volunteers’ mental health. In crisis cases such as those that have the potential to result in life-threatening outcomes, volunteers may hold themselves accountable for other students’ situations.

Even if peer-support volunteers immediately direct callers to more appropriate services in these cases, the extended wait could prove detrimental. Given that 10 per cent of calls the line received were of this nature, eliminating the middleman is well-worth doing.

PSL executives raised a valuable point in defense of the line by suggesting that students sometimes wish to talk about grave topics like suicide and fear that professional help might end up involving authorities. By no means am I mental health professional, but there is a difference between discussing suicidal ideation and posing a danger to yourself. In either case, professional help should be sought out, and it shouldn’t be the responsibility or burden of other students to do so.

For crisis cases and situations that are extremely time-sensitive and need the assistance of professionals, students can only help so much. 

I have personally never made use of the PSL, but I have called crisis lines more than once in the past. Excepting wait times, they have been nothing but accessible and helpful. Ultimately, these services exist to help people as they need it and on their own terms. There are few situations that would escalate beyond a phone call, and those situations would typically be emergencies. Professional counsellors can be relied on and trusted to be both impartial and confidential

Bear in mind too that the closure of the PSL is not necessarily a loss to student support. The MSU’s Executive Board assures us that the money no longer spent on the PSL will be used to increase awareness of existing services with professional counsellors on staff. Perhaps the closure of the PSL is also an opportunity to invest in mental health support on campus in general.

It is my hope that university administration considers the usage statistics of the line as further evidence of the overwhelming demand for expanded mental health services on campus.

While the PSL may have been introduced to handle issues separate from mental health concerns, its use as such indicates a clear need to rethink its existence. Given the sensitivity of matters of mental health, an under equipped support line can be worse than ineffective. Student demand should be listened to in this case and I wholeheartedly believe that the PSL budget would be better spent enriching mental health support services on campus.

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