A father whose undergraduate son killed himself after he fell behind with his studies has urged universities to take better care of students who are struggling with mental health issues.
Jos Winfield, an undergraduate at Brunel University London, would have celebrated his 22nd birthday this Saturday, but on Fathers’ day this year his parents found him dead in his bedroom at the family home in Somerset.
“He was lost,” Jos’s father, Mark, said. “He got himself into a deep depression and he thought there was nowhere else to go. The university could and should have done more for him.”
As tens of thousands of 18-year-olds in England prepare to leave the family home to start new lives at university next month, Winfield urged parents to be watchful of their children. “Just keep a close eye on your kids,” he said.
“People need to know that they [universities] don’t give a monkeys. They don’t want to know. Jos is just another statistic, but something needs to be done. This has destroyed us. I don’t know how many parents have to go through this.”
Jos grew up in Ashtead, Surrey. He was quiet, did well at school, especially at maths, and had no history of mental health issues. The first his parents knew he had applied to Brunel to study aerospace engineering was when the student finance papers came through. “I was proud of him,” said his father. “He’d done it all on his own.”
His first year went well. The course was largely maths-based, which played to Jos’s strengths. “He seemed happy as Larry,” said his father. Then in the second year, he later told counsellors, he began to lose confidence and started to isolate himself.
He struggled to concentrate in lectures, was sleeping at irregular times and caught Covid in January 2022. At the end of the year he was told he had failed to achieve the minimum requirements to progress and had been withdrawn from the course. He returned to the family home and in July he tried to kill himself.
“He decided he had nowhere to go, he had failed his exams, he had no future,” said his father. “It’s like they just left him until the end of the year, which is utterly and completely wrong. We feel like he was left to rot.”
On that occasion, Jos survived. He appealed against the decision by the board of examiners, claiming extenuating circumstances. Then, after months of uncertainty, at a time when he was under the care of his local emergency mental health team, he was finally told he could resit the year and returned to Brunel in September 2022.
“He was in a right state,” Jos’s father said. “They took the whole summer to decide whether he could come back, which I think is wrong.” He was also finding it hard to adapt to his parents’ move from Surrey to Somerset.
Jos returned to Brunel in September and had some counselling sessions at the university where he said he was feeling better, but his academic records showed he continued to struggle, failing to submit the right coursework or attend exams.
“He came home on 5 June,” his father said. “On Saturday 17 June I was playing backgammon with him, having a great time. On the Sunday I walked into his room and he’d been dead all night.”
There has been widespread media coverage of a number of suicides by students at universities, including Matthew Wickes, an engineering student at Southampton University, who was worried he had failed his third year and killed himself on the day he was due to receive his results. At an inquest into his death this week, the coroner issued a regulation 28 “prevention of future deaths” report and suggested there should be an early warning system in universities to help identify struggling, vulnerable students.
Groups set up by bereaved parents, known as The Learn Network and #ForThe100, whose children killed themselves while students, have been campaigning for legal reform so that universities have a statutory duty of care for their students.
Robert Abrahart, whose daughter Natasha took her own life in 2018 while studying at the University of Bristol, said: “Everybody is entitled to a duty of care. It is a legal obligation to act reasonably and responsibly. In numerous cases, a small amount of common sense, together with more kindness, compassion and empathy, or by just caring, might well have stopped a student from being wronged or harmed or dying.”
A Brunel spokesperson said the university could not comment in detail on specific cases for reasons of confidentiality. “Jos’s death was a tragedy that was deeply upsetting for the Brunel community. Like all universities, we primarily provide education, and also provide support services to help students who are experiencing difficulties.
“We always have to balance that with respecting our students’ rights as adults to choose how much of that support they want to engage with. Where there is a known or immediate risk of self-harm, we do everything we can to get our students to healthcare providers and emergency services.”
Student support at Brunel includes an emergency contact “opt-in” scheme that allows staff to contact a named person if they are worried about a student. In the last academic year, 79% opted into the scheme, where students nominate someone to contact in emergencies, whether a parent, guardian or friend.
