Hello, many of you won’t know who I am and many won’t recognise my name either. I’m Matt Callow and I’m here first of all to raise awareness that mental health can and DOES impacts everybody on this planet.

I have lived a life of normality to many external spectators; I play rugby, I love drum and bass, I spend time with friends and I enjoy going out. However, I have and do suffer with mental health issues and by standing up for this election I hope to raise awareness that anybody can suffer with this huge problem.

The natural pressure that university causes can often result in a negative experience for the students of Roehampton. I would like to commend the university for their recent “elephant in the room” campaign and everything that the university does to raise awareness and the first of my policies is to make sure that this remains the case and people stay motivated to change this area of student life, let’s all raise awareness.

Current waiting times for the Counselling service exceeds 6 weeks, although funding may be stretched, this needs to be cut down. People go too long without the support they need and perhaps become apathetic to the process, leading to abstaining from support altogether.

Furthermore, to help alleviate the pressure put on the counselling service, I would like to propose a group of passionate and dedicated people to be formally trained and able to respond by email or a text message service to help any immediate problems. This is an interim approach to helping the strain put on our support services.

The vast and wonderful spectrum of societies we have at Roehampton are often unused due to the reluctancy of people having difficulties to go along to events. I would like to liaise with the social and welfare secretaries to make sure sport and societies are doing everything they can to be approachable but also able to help support the peers around them.

To follow on from this, I will be holding regular meetings with the VP of Welfare and heads of societies and departments to really grasp the scope of the issues we may have in Roehampton. Using different perspectives and ideas will create a holistic action plan that is flexible to react to whatever situation arises.

All response teams such as security should be trained in identifying mental health being the cause of certain actions. This is to ensure that particular care is taken for these situations to ensure people get the right support going forward.

Finally, I would like to congratulate all of the people running in this position and all over roles in the election. Mental health is often a misunderstood paradigm in society as it impacts everybody differently, the more people that discuss their experiences of mental health really helps the correct interventions to be put in place for those who can’t.