In universities, mental health problems such as depression and anxiety afflict one in four students, while student suicides have reached a record level in recent years and dropouts have trebled. The burden of mental health illnesses is only likely to increase as stigma recedes and more people come forward with their sufferings. According to the Institute for Public Policy Research, five times as many students as 10 years ago have disclosed a mental health issue to their university.

It’s well established that the NHS is underfunded in this area: adult patients with moderate mental health needs can wait upwards of 18 weeks for psychological wellbeing services. Yet university counselling services are stretched too – across the UK, universities are staffed at a quarter to a third of what is required. At my university, students must wait up to five weeks to receive on average just four one-on-one counselling sessions. That is not surprising: there are only 15 counsellors on payroll, eight of whom are part-time.

These delays can lead to an exacerbation of symptoms. I recall a former graduate student colleague who waited six months for her first psychiatric appointment. Over this period her health deteriorated to the point she ended up on sick leave. She had to turn to the private sector – an impossible luxury for many students – and it still took her months to recover and finally regain the mental and physical strength to finish her PhD.

But blaming the student mental health crisis solely on the admittedly scarce resources available is too easy. We need the services that already exist to be better harmonised: provision of mental health care to students is fragmented between multiple agencies across universities and the NHS, which do not always effectively talk to each other. There is no clear idea of who is ultimately responsible.

Dr Paul Wilkinson, an academic specialising in youth psychiatry at the University of Cambridge, says we should think of “mental health being like a pyramid, with severity on the Y axis and numbers on the X axis”. Not many people have severe mental illnesses, but lots have milder mental health problems. He says that while lots of agencies provide services, they tend to focus on different parts of the pyramid. The NHS mostly specialises in higher-level, severe psychiatric disorders, while universities and GPs take care of lower-intensity concerns.

In theory, this means students should always have somebody to turn to for help. But long waiting lists, capped sessions, and the bureaucratic burden of securing appointments can effectively bar access. Equally, transitioning between home and universities causes some students to fall through the gaps. Universities should be able to automatically register students as visitors to local surgeries, which in turn could communicate with GPs back home.

A more ambitious reform might see the NHS, universities, and colleges running an integrated, co-funded students’ national NHS mental health department capable of liaising with university and school counselling services, as well as GP surgeries and specialist psychiatric services. A national electronic medical record system would allow every actor to confidentially access the data they need to take care of students, wherever they are.

On a small scale this integration already happens. For instance, the clinical school in Cambridge pays the NHS to provide rapid mental health services to its students. This is a model that could be built on across universities.

Students are a particularly vulnerable group since mental health problems often start in late adolescence or early adulthood. This is why Dr Mary-Ellen Lynall, a psychiatry academic at the University of Cambridge, says it’s crucial that universities and mental health organisations work together across geographical boundaries to ensure that appropriate help is on hand both in and out of term time. We need an integrated service at all levels of the pyramid of care, where the agencies involved talk, collaborate, and share data and resources. Access standards will not be improved by gatekeeping and bureaucratic red tape.