Mr Kilian, you are in charge of the psychosocial counseling center at the Leipzig Student Union.

What is the current situation with regard to the corona situation?

Sarah Obertreis

Editor in business.

  • Follow I follow

Since the first lockdown came to an end, we have received an enormous number of inquiries.

That is still the case today.

In normal times, fewer students contact us than usual in late summer; the waiting times for an initial consultation are only extended again during the examination phase.

It wasn't like that this year, there was no flattening at all.

So students have to wait a long time before you can help them?

In between it was three months.

That is not acceptable.

That's why the Studentenwerk reacted and we were able to significantly enlarge the team.

The waiting times have been reduced from three months to six weeks.

Since the pandemic, we have also been offering more group offers in order to be able to support a larger number of people and to counteract social isolation.

You have made projections for this year in your advice center: Almost half of all inquiries had to do with the consequences of the pandemic.

We recently sat down again as a team and gathered what kind of difficulties the students had encountered over the past year and a half. On average, the inquiries have all slipped a little further in the direction of heavy loads. There are some students who have completely lost their social footing. Some were no longer able to maintain contact with their parents by phone because the different perspectives on the pandemic created too strong conflicts in their togetherness. Living together in shared apartments suddenly had an unbelievable explosive power: If all four roommates had a different view of the pandemic, the different experiences could no longer be brought together.Even in circles of friends, the different ways of dealing with the restrictions has led to major problems.

It sounds like the pandemic has fundamentally changed something in the mental health of the students.

Many of those who contact us have had a very good life beforehand.

But the corona measures have increased properties that are totally normal to a certain extent.

Social fears, for example.

People who are otherwise more cautious have lost all opportunities to overcome their reluctance and to practice this overcoming in lectures, in seminars and at parties.

Our social fears increase when we do not have corrective relationship experiences, and the thresholds for getting out of ourselves become higher, even when others feel the same way.

Does that mean that after three Corona semesters it is now much more difficult for many students to feel good again on pub crawls and parties?

Yes, exactly.

In addition, there is still a lot of uncertainty in general because of the corona virus.

Do we also have to assume that many groups of friends did not survive the phases of lockdown?

Even if it was never said so explicitly: The restrictions required social triage.

This split up some groups of friends and sometimes led to massive experiences of exclusion among the students, which they could no longer cope with without outside help.

Some students were totally isolated.