Boundaries for the people doing this work

Support staff are not clinicians and should not be positioned as any.

Student support staff routinely encounter distress, disclosure of serious matters, and situations involving risk. Most are not clinically trained, most have no clinical supervision, and the boundary between support and counselling is crossed regularly because there is nobody else in the room.

The protection for both parties is clarity about what the role does: listen, understand the practical situation, arrange what the institution can arrange, and refer where the matter requires somebody qualified. That is a substantial and useful role and it is not therapy.

Staff need to know the referral routes for serious matters cold, including out of hours, and need to have been told what to do when somebody discloses a risk to themselves or others. Working that out during the conversation is unfair to everybody in it.

Supervision or at least structured debriefing matters for the same reasons it does in any role involving repeated exposure to other people's distress, and it is almost never provided to student support staff, who are frequently classified administratively.

Where an institution's support workload has grown into work requiring clinical competence, that is a staffing question rather than a training one, and treating it as the latter puts unqualified people in positions where a mistake has serious consequences.