2026 Mental Health and Emotional Wellbeing
Nurturing Emotional Wellbeing in Everyday University Life
The Mental Health and Emotional Wellbeing Challenge offers a range of enquiry groups that enable you to follow your interest, apply knowledge gained through your course or indeed draw on your ‘lived experience’.
Potential areas to focus on are highlighted for each enquiry group, with many based around Nurture-U, a national research project addressing student mental health and wellbeing; however, these are just to provide examples of possible focus, you are encouraged to discuss an area of focus within your group.
A major aspect of Grand Challenges is the development of highly valued transferable skills to support you in your future careers. We will challenge you to justify the decisions informing your output in a supportive manner, ensuring confidence and competence in defending your decision-making will be enhanced.
Some students may find the content emotionally challenging.
This Challenge will run on Streatham Campus.
Enquiry Groups:
Digital devices and interventions, now mainstream in physical health, are increasingly applied to support emotional wellbeing or treat mental health difficulties. Many mobile phone apps, some of which are some free to download from app stores, claim to support or treat mental health difficulties through approaches such as mindfulness or relaxation exercises, journaling emotions and thoughts, encouraging exercise or indeed through psychological treatment. Services ranging from the NHS and community or charity organizations to University Wellbeing Services are adopting digital app or computer-based interventions. Indeed, several Nurture-U research streams have explored the effectiveness of digital interventions informed by Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.
Challenges
Whilst these tools are often viewed as a panacea to improve access to mental health support for emotional difficulties or treatment, challenges persist regarding acceptability, adoption and maintaining engagement even after users start.
Opportunities
Possible focuses include:
- Attitudes toward digital computer or app-based interventions.
- Ways to enhance acceptability among university students.
- Evaluating features of system architecture that may promote or discourage engagement.
- Scoping free to use systems to improve awareness of what is currently available.
- Or even if you simply don’t like the idea of using digital devices at all developing a campaign against adoption.
Significant developments have been made to improve access to evidence-based psychological therapies for the treatment of emotional difficulties. The implementation of NHS Talking Therapies for anxiety and depression services across England and innovations in the University Student Wellbeing Service have improved access. However, whilst research efforts are trying to address this challenge, including several Nurture-U research streams and a PhD focussing on Saudi international students, barriers to access remain. At present the majority of groups with diverse characteristics spanning variations in identity, race/ethnicity, gender, disability, age, socioeconomic background or their intersections continue to be under-represented.
Challenges
Individuals from groups with diverse characteristics or those with intersecting identities often find interventions or services unacceptable. Furthermore, even when accessed, many drop out because support fails to meet specific needs. This has led to Positive/Good Practice Guides for groups including autistic people, Armed Forces Veterans, LGBTQ+, and those with long-term conditions.
Opportunities
For groups with diverse characteristics, potential focuses include:
- Recognising service features that limit acceptability.
- Identifying practical ways to enhance service acceptability.
- Exploring a range of community-based approaches to enhance emotional wellbeing.
- Evaluating acceptability of translated interventions in NHS Talking Therapies for non-English speakers.
- Assessing adaptations from Positive/Good Practice Guides.
A compassionate campus brings clear benefits for both students and universities. Students gain better emotional wellbeing, academic performance, and social outcomes, whilst universities see higher retention, engagement, and satisfaction. All of these areas contribute to university rankings and league tables, so it is perhaps surprising that many efforts to create a compassionate campus are considered tokenistic. The Building a More Compassionate Campus report from Nurture-U has identified a number of areas for improvement.
Challenges
The Building a More Compassionate Campus report offers practical guidance for universities to foster genuine compassion. However, it has not yet been fully applied to assess aspects of university life that could strengthen compassionate campuses or develop solutions.
Opportunities
The Building a More Compassionate Campus report can serve as a strong foundation to explore ways to enhance a compassionate campus at the University of Exeter. You may, however, choose to pursue wider interests in this area.
Poor awareness of mental health difficulties, negative attitudes, fear of stigma, and their impact on university life are major barriers to seeking help. While knowledge and awareness of mental health increase among those who do seek help, students who avoid it due to limited understanding often continue to struggle. A key solution is improving mental health literacy, which research shows promotes help-seeking behaviour and can provide sufficient support or prevention the escalation of emotional difficulties that for some, reduce the need for further treatment.
Challenges
Nurture-U has developed and tested an online course on mental health and emotional wellbeing. However, given students' heavy study demands and limited time, challenges remain in improving access to the course and enhancing its overall acceptability without adding further burden.
Opportunities
Potential focuses include:
- Exploring ways to effectively promote the online course to maximise uptake and engagement.
- Evaluating whether the course content adequately addresses the areas students at the university find most helpful.
- Identifying how the course, or specific content, could better address emotional wellbeing challenges unique to different academic disciplines.
- Considering necessary adaptations to maximise acceptability for students with diverse characteristics.
Nurture-U has successfully addressed several key areas with the potential to enhance emotional wellbeing, improve access to mental health support and treatment, and enrich overall university life. While these results are being used to develop recommendations in each area, universities often encounter significant challenges when implementing mental health initiatives. Actively engaging with students and valuing their perspectives on the research outcomes from Nurture-U offers an important way to overcome many of these implementation barriers and respond to specific issues identified through the research.
Challenges
While data collection has been completed across most research streams, there is now a need to engage students to help shape effective implementation. Additionally, it is important to sustain and maximise the benefits of implementation beyond the initial phases, which are often marked by high levels of enthusiasm.
Opportunities
The research outputs from each Nurture-U research stream present unique implementation challenges or highlight ongoing issues. Understanding the focus of each stream may help you identify areas where your lived experience could offer valuable insight and generate ideas to support effective implementation.
The Enquiry Groups above are based on the Nurture-U research programme. However, if your group would like to explore a mental health topic of your own choosing, simply raise the idea with your allocated facilitator.
