A new initiative offering support and a listening ear to fellow students has been founded on campus. We spoke to All Ears cofounder Elin and All Ears volunteer Alice, about the purpose of the initiative, why it is needed on campus and to ask if the UvA should be doing more?

Life gets on top of us all at some point. University deadlines loom over us, petty squabbles with friends get us down, and the ever-shorter winter days close in on us. With all this in mind, Elin Swaan and Merel Roseboom created All Ears, a student led initiative that offers support from psychology students for those struggling with the smaller things that affect our mental health.

Elin explained that the initiative was born out of ‘the worst stages of lockdown’, and that it was clear that friends and fellow students around her were struggling. It is here that she drew the line between the skill set of psychology students and the increasing instability of student mental health. Elin explained that although psychology students aren’t trained psychologists, they have knowledge in wellbeing, an ability to listen and know how to ‘ask the right questions’.

What Elin and Merel have created is a network of support for students who want to talk about everything from ‘a date that sucked’ or ‘feeling overwhelmed with your schedule for uni’. For this reason, All Ears is a really positive example of how students can and do come together to support each other. However, is it really the job of students to be offering this kind of network? Should the UvA be doing more?

Elin explained that when taking the initiative to the UvA, they were in agreement with them that students were struggling a lot during the pandemic and were keen to help All Ears out. Although Elin feels as though the university does enough within its jurisdiction, volunteer Alice felt more dissatisfied with the university. She expressed her feelings of an ‘illusion of support’ from the university, when often the reality is that ‘we are completely on our own running against time’.

It is clear that All Ears is bringing something very useful and needed to campus life, it’s helping us pull through some of the toughest times and making sure we know that, ‘when needed, there is someone willing to listen’. But is it really down to us to organise our own network? With the current wait to see a psychologist from the university at three weeks, can the UvA really not be doing more?