Supporting student resilience and emotional well-being
A student at an university in Kyiv stopped coming to class. For three months, staff logged it as an attendance problem: missed seminars, late assignments, the kind of pattern that usually gets a warning email. It was only in a one-on-one conversation that a lecturer learned the student was in the middle of an acute depressive episode. Nobody had missed obvious warning signs. There simply wasn’t a structure in place to catch quieter ones.
Istanbul staff had a term for the period where this kind of thing is most likely to happen: the first weeks of a semester as a “critical phase of vulnerability.” In that window, a student has to register with the university, open a bank account, arrange insurance, find housing, and sort out a residence permit, all while starting classes. Staff described students slipping into what they called administrative paralysis: fear of a mistake on some form, layered on top of not knowing the system and not speaking the language, building into a chronic anxiety that undermines academic performance before exams have even started.
With official psychological services often hard to reach in practice, tutors and mentors become the default first point of contact, trained for it or not. Padua staff described conversations that begin with a question about exam registration and end, twenty minutes later, with a student talking about fear for a parent under fire back home. Zagreb staff named the consequence directly: this pattern is a source of burnout for the mentors themselves, not just a gap in student support.
There’s a demographic detail worth taking seriously here. Survey data from earlier in the project found that 69.2% of Ukrainian students across the four host countries are women, a direct consequence of exit restrictions on men of conscription age. Padua tutors described the particular weight this creates: female students managing academic stress on top of ongoing anxiety about brothers, partners, and fathers who stayed behind. That specific kind of worry, anxiety experienced across a distance rather than a shared threat, doesn’t register cleanly on standard psychological screening tools. None of the five universities reported a programme addressing it directly.
Kyiv staff proposed a specific fix: systematic training for mentors in recognising psychological distress, paired with clear referral protocols, not so a tutor can treat a student, but so they know exactly when and where to send one.
The recommendations that came out of the research are specific rather than aspirational. A short introductory training, around four hours, for anyone doing mentoring work, covering how to recognise distress signals and where to refer a student. English-language counselling with a schedule that actually fits around classes and part-time jobs, not just office hours on weekday mornings. Partnerships with organisations that can offer support in Ukrainian, including diaspora psychological services already operating in several EU countries, where a formal partnership is realistic.
None of this requires a university to build a full clinical psychology department from scratch. What it requires is treating a struggling student’s well-being as something the institution is responsible for noticing, rather than something the student is expected to raise on their own. The difference between three weeks and three months, in the IEU case, wasn’t a lack of care. It was a lack of structure.
A tutor who knows the signs and knows who to call is not a substitute for a psychologist. But right now, in most of the universities in this study, the tutor is often the only person paying close enough attention to notice at all.
