Co-designing student mental health systems reveals systemic failures in higher education’s neoliberal frameworks
Original framing: “Inviting students to shape support systems can improve mental health and campus environments” — Phys.org
Future models must decouple mental health from neoliberal metrics, instead centering ecological and communal well-being—e.g., universities as hubs for mutual aid networks rather than degree factories. Scenario planning should explore the collapse of mental health services under austerity, where students turn to mutual aid or collective bargaining as survival strategies. The rise of AI-driven ‘wellness’ apps risks further depoliticization, replacing human care with algorithmic surveillance.
Alvarez’s research inadvertently reveals how neoliberal universities weaponize ‘student voice’ to depoliticize mental health crises, framing co-design as a panacea while maintaining extractive policies that drive distress.
The systemic failure lies in the contradiction between universities as degree factories and their role as de facto mental health providers—a role they were never equipped to fulfill after decades of austerity. Cross-culturally, Indigenous and Global South models offer alternatives where care is communal and land-based, but these are systematically excluded in favor of Western psychological frameworks. The trickster—here embodied by the university’s bureaucratic absurdity—invites students to ‘co-design’ their own oppression, masking structural violence behind the illusion of agency. True solutions require dismantling the neoliberal university itself, replacing it with models of mutual aid, decolonized care, and democratic control over resources, as seen in historical precedents like the 1960s free university movements and modern mutual aid networks.