Most articles on the City of Oxford are about tourism or history.
This one explores some of the issues that can cause strain and mental distress in the lives of the people who live here.
Contents
University of Oxford
Oxford is most famous for The University of Oxford, which is almost completely entwined with the city’s history, being almost a thousand years old as an institution. The university comprises 38 individual colleges, and, at the time of writing, is currently number one in the world on the Times University Rankings.
In terms of competitiveness for entry, there were over 23,000 applications for 3,300 graduate places and 38,000 for 5,500 postgraduate places in 2023. Only around one in seven applicants actually get in.
Other issues related to studying in such a prestigious place include:
Competitiveness & mastery
Oxford students have all had straight As and a wealth of extracurricular activities to support their entry to this top university.
They were likely the most academically gifted children in their secondary school, with parents who encouraged their learning, so that they know what it is like to make sacrifices and work hard for their education.
Now suddenly they are in a peer group of others of similar abilities and dedication. They’ve gone from being a big fish in a small pond to a sea of big fish.
This can be a shock, and something to grieve; the loss of the excellence that made them unique in secondary school. Conversely, there may also be a sense of belonging at finding your people – your big fish.
Burn out
The demands of study are intense, and there isn’t a finite end to research. This can leave people pushing themselves, which can inhibit chances for self-care and laden them with a sense of guilt of not doing enough. Added to this the other demands of university life (discussed later), struggling to reach a balance, and burning out are common.
In 2021-22 13.8% of Oxford University students sought counselling – over a third of which were for anxiety related issues, which are easy to understand given the demands and pressures of studying at such a prestigious university.
Imposter syndrome
Imposter syndrome is a sense of not being good enough that can feel deep and emotional rather than logical, and hard to shake even in the face of achievements.
Ironically, progression in education and knowing more also creates an awareness of what we do not know, so imposter syndrome can deepen as someone progresses academically or in their career.
This imposter syndrome can be aggravated further by the previous points about competitiveness with others at ‘The Number One University’, and lead to a striving to belong which can contribute to burnout.
Student Life
There are 21,750 full-time students at Oxford University, which is striking because the population of the city was 163,100 in 2022 meaning 13% of the City Population were students there.
This percentage increases even further to 22% when Oxford Brookes University (where I myself studied) is included. If you then include colleges, apprenticeships, summer schools, and English language schools it gives you a real sense of Oxford as the city where people visit to learn. In fact, 48% of the Oxford population have a degree (relative to 34% for the rest of England) & 70% of the jobs in Oxford are within knowledge intensive industries.
Here are some of the issues faced by students studying in Oxford.
Loneliness
Going to University is usually accompanied by a sense of uprooting. Most students will have left their home-city, and in Oxford University almost half of the students have come from outside of the UK. For many undergraduate students, university in their late teens will be the first time they have left home and began to navigate the world independently from their parents. The many pressures and domestic tasks associated with this can further add to the sense of imposter syndrome or burnout – questioning when we are an adult.
That’s generally what’s meant by ‘student life’: going to a strange city, perhaps even a strange country (where English is your second language), on your own, away from the security of parental relationships, where you likely know no-one.
Added to that, many of the calming activities you used to engage in (friends, familiar walks or places, spending time on a hobby) may be hard to fit in, or be linked to your home-city. This can all result in a loneliness from uprooting accompanied by a grieving of the previous home you have lost – all the while having to mask that to propel yourself into a new university setting.
Fitting in & reinventing ourselves
There is also a loneliness that can come from trying to make new meaningful connections in an unfamiliar city. This is followed by trying to follow social conventions, rules, and traditions of the peers or university you have joined. Oxford, for example, has many traditions and etiquette such as the formal attire you must wear at formal meals. More generally, a new student is trying to fit into different social groups and may be meeting many different types of people during Fresher’s Week which each have different interests that bind them. University can be a place of discovering yourself, and what you enjoy, but that can also be matched by a sense of anxiety at not quite knowing who you are as you emerge into independence.
Alcohol
Many of the University societies and social events during Fresher’s Week revolve around drinking. Added to that, many students will be 18 and just leaving home – giving them the freedom to drink and party. This can create an indulgence without parental regulation, which can be enjoyable, but with the background pressures of change and responsibilities risk verging into addiction or unhealthy drinking patterns. The associated anxiety of study can also prompt drug use to aid sleep, concentration, or just to escape from that pressure. Someone who is in recovery from substances, or who doesn’t drink (e.g. for cultural reasons) may feel the loneliness of going to university more intensely without alcohol as a common interest.
Teaching
Teaching carries its own stresses, and that applies for lecturers, but also primary and secondary school teachers.
School teachers are expected to play many roles: teaching for children of different academic ability, special educational needs provision, and working with children with English as a second language. Outside of teaching, they are also expected to notice child development issues, identify and refer for safeguarding or therapeutic support issues, comment on the child for reports or parent’s evenings, speak with the parents about academic and behavioural needs, facilitate extra-curricular activities, do their own planning, large amounts of marking, and often the administrative or facility tasks such as booking rooms/cleaning/buying their own stationary or craft supplies.
Teaching is an impossible role (to fully do all these things in a working week), with teachers often being blamed for behavioural issues and child development. It is impossible to achieve all the requirements, and a continual sense of being assessed or monitored (like with Ofsted) adds to that pressure and anxiety of trying to balance the demands. Teachers will often work similar hours to a doctor to achieve these demands, but the pay and balancing of a social life outside are a challenge. Many teachers will burnout or experience mental health impacts from teaching.
Poverty, Housing, Cost of Living, & Homelessness
Oxford is one of the most expensive places for housing outside of London, except there isn’t the London-Based Pay Increase to compensate for those housing costs.
An Oxford house is fifteen times the average salary compared to England’s average of 8.3 times. Rental prices are also some of the highest in the South East – and for that same reason, over 15% less people own their homes, and a larger portion of our salaries goes on rent or mortgages. This means that a lot of workers in Oxford will either commute or be stuck in a vicious cycle of renting or high housing costs. The high rental prices also affects premises, with businesses in the city putting a lot of their profits into the building, inflating the ‘cost of living’ for goods & services, when people already have less disposable income due to housing costs.
Oxford is Expensive
With regards to our mental health, we can feel trapped from advancing from our housing situation by renting. This can bring with it a sense of hopelessness or of simply surviving, rather than working towards ownership of a property or saving money at the end of the month.
Renting can also feel unstable, firstly in recognising that it is not your permanent home, and you are restricted in how homely you can make it, and secondly our landlord may ask us to leave at reasonably short notice. Moving homes can feel like an annual event (especially for students) but psychologically it’s a significant stressor adapting to a new home environment rather than being settled in a permanent premises. It can also result in very real financial difficulties and money worries about simply surviving.
Poverty
Renting in receipt of benefits can be tricky as the Local Housing Allowance (LHA) is often below rental rates, meaning you need to contribute towards rent above your income. No DSS policies were outlawed in 2020, which means a landlord cannot exclude you from renting if you are on benefits, but the housing prices alone or high deposits and ‘rent in advance’ can be exclusive. Few landlords accept Oxford’s Lord Mayor’s Deposit Scheme where the council will pay your deposit for you in the form of a bond, so although it seems like there are solutions these aren’t accessible in practice.
All of this means that the poorest households can struggle to afford to live in the city, and 20.9% of people live in Social Housing. Social Housing is also saturated in Oxford, with only 5% of people on the General Housing Register being offered housing a year – in fact, in the decade I’ve worked in Homelessness, I’ve seen waiting lists increase to eight times as long.
This has led to significant areas of deprivation within Oxford City. The Index of Multiple Deprivation measures relative depravation in England, and this goes beyond just poverty (a financial measure) to seven domains:
Income, Employment, Education, Health, Crime, Barriers to Housing Services, and the Living Environment (both in and outdoors).
It found 10/83 of Oxford’s neighbourhoods are among the 20% most deprived in England: Low skill, low income, few facilities, high rates of crime, more mental health struggles, as well as a shorter life expectancy (a difference of 13 years for men, and 9 for women).
Just like the hopelessness caused by high rents, there can be a sense of feeling trapped within deprived areas – being disadvantaged in almost every domain, not because of your effort or motivation, but simply because of the environment you settle or grow up in due to Oxford’s inherent issues with poverty & housing costs.
Homelessness
Due to these barriers to housing, Oxford has a high rate of Homelessness or people living in temporary or supported accommodation.
The city has good homeless services, which attract a lot of tourism or visitors, but the previously mentioned issues with housing can block pathways and make it difficult to leave homeless services. This goes some way to explaining the 20% increase in homelessness in Oxford relative to the rest of England (that’s 1.8 people per one hundred thousand vs 1.5).
Homelessness is a complex and multifactorial issue – you may want to read my article on 30 Obstacles Facing Homeless People that I wrote after working with Homeless Oxfordshire for ten years.
In summary I will say that homelessness is not just a housing issue; there are numerous support needs such as: mental health issues, substance misuse, a history of offending, debt, education, working through trauma, safeguarding, and meaningful uses of time that need navigating alongside safe, secure, and affordable housing. Counselling has its place alongside these interventions and needs to be at a client’s pace, rather than contributing to further trauma or overwhelm.
The NHS
Oxford City happens to have a few hospitals for both physical and mental health: the John Radcliffe, Nuffield, Churchill, Warneford, and Littlemore. Furthermore, most of these are part of the Oxford University NHS Foundation Trust meaning that they are Teaching Hospitals. Just like the University itself, people come to Oxford to learn & practice medicine.
On the whole, citizens of Oxford are healthy. They are 7.1% more active & have 13% less weight issues than the average Brit. The 2019 Local Authority Health Summary shows that people in Oxford are more likely to survive cancer, significantly less likely to die in road traffic accidents, and hospital admissions for violent crimes are almost half the national average. In other worlds, Oxford’s wards offer relatively good services.
That said, Oxford does have higher rates of self-harm, admissions for alcohol related or specific conditions, and high rates of STIs and tuberculosis. Many of these things are related to the deprivation discussed in the last section.
So what are some of the presenting issues that we encounter if we work in the NHS and healthcare sector more generally.
Stress
– The hours are often far longer than a standard 37.5hr working week and include long shifts alongside nights that impact on the ability to sleep and carry a perpetual tiredness.
– Training in medicine is knowledge intensive: balancing learning, exams, observations, and keeping up to date with journals. This stress of continual academic development, advancement, and scrutiny; alongside regularly changing roles to gain experience, add to continual stress in the nature of the job.
– The role is high-risk: Mistakes can cost lives, or result in lawsuits and boards removing your medical licence or fitness to practice. However, workloads, expectations, and a lack of clinical support do not give the support or space to reflect on the treatment of each patient.
– The NHS has endured years of funding cuts or privatisation: reducing its capacity and resources to carry out the care employees are paid to provide. As well as cuts, strikes, pay issues; it is also experiencing a staffing crisis with many posts not actively filled, which adds pressure to the staff covering those roles.
Burn Out
– It is hard to strike a work-life balance when doing shiftwork and so many hours in a working week. The sleep deprivation and academic pressures also mean that time off isn’t really ‘time off’ to enjoy a social life and family outside of the demands of the job.
– Systems can normalise suffering, and empathy burnout can be a symptom as we don’t have the capacity to give any more. Empathy for ourselves can be drained, let alone for others.
– Patients in hospital are experiencing high-stress existential issues and fear for their family. This strain often presents in our shadow side, and for this reason NHS staff can suffer a lot of abuse and harassment at the hands of stressed patients and their families. It isn’t tolerable or right, but something NHS staff are more exposed to than the general public.
– Lack of support (48% of staff who took leave did not feel supported). There can also often not be room for debriefing after an incident, clinical supervision, or HR systems that feel personal and recognise you as an individual rather than following a procedure.
Mental Health
– Trauma & Complex PTSD: the General Public are rarely exposed to death, serious injury, abuse, or grief. Medical professionals will experience these regularly within the role. Picture an ambulance driver being the first on the scene to a road traffic accident, gory injury, or a heart attack where the patient died. These experiences would evoke trauma responses in anyone to have witnessed this but become routine for the professionals. Repeated exposure to traumatic events without the opportunity to process can result in very human trauma responses such as PTSD. This same effect also exists in other high-stress careers such as policing, homeless services, social services, the council, social care, and fire services.
– Anxiety: not being able to switch off after a shift wondering if case-decisions were adequate; panic/dread/panic attacks about going into work and facing more demands from an overstretched system; a system that is based on policy and thought and less on emotion can engage the rational brain but not give space for us to process and feel our day.
– Depression: disillusionment about making a difference; burning out into a shell of yourself, a sense of numbness; a lack of hope for an improvement as the staffing crisis continues; detachment from yourself and your own needs
– Death Anxiety: repeated exposure to death, terminal illness, and near misses that can make the reality of our own mortality more vivid and carry with it deep existential angst at our own mortality. Health-anxiety as our own medical knowledge increases, that we might have a rare condition, and a tendency to research and fixate on our aches or pains.
If you work for the NHS, you may find this site helpful to access support
Tourism, ESOL, & Cultural Acceptance
Being such a historic and architecturally beautiful city, Oxford attracts a lot of tourists – 7 million in fact, which made it the ninth most visited city in the UK. Attractions like Oxford’s thirty-eight stunning colleges (including Christ Church where the author of Alice in Wonderland lectured at, and which inspired the hall scene in Harry Potter), several museums, history like the Martyr’s Memorial or Radcliffe Camera, our castle complex, and several theatres all attract people.
Summers can feel diverse and vibrant in the city, as the students leave and the city is swarmed by groups who visit to learn English or just see the sights in this city – so close to London or Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon.
Added to this, 18% of the population have English as a second language (relative to the national average of 9%), whereas 2.3% either cannot speak English or cannot speak it well.
Oxford has the second highest ethnic minority population in South-East England, with figures saying somewhere between 27-35% of residents are born outside of the UK (this site explains the breakdown of nationalities).
So what kind of therapeutic issues present with these demographics?
Transience
For the summer schools, Oxford is a three-month home; for the tourists a day visit. Even though Oxford is a comparatively small and busy city, this can create a loneliness or ‘temporary essence’ to the city. You may struggle to find connections that are longer term, or experience home sickness. You may have had regular counselling back home, and a visit away means separation from support systems around you or needing quicker more solution focussed support. A tourist is also new to a city, its customs, and geography which can be anxiety-invoking at the risk of getting lost.
Diversity
Being in a minority population carries with it risks around acceptance, discrimination, inadvertent exclusion, and a lack of understanding to your cultural preferences or expectations. Added to that, the same homesickness described earlier, and a potential feeling of differences when trying to find community and connection within the city.
English as a Second Language
Not being able to communicate can be a constant source of anxiety and barrier to community, inclusion, and accessing services. The city can feel foreign and met with a perpetual sense of getting it wrong. Safe places to practice and learn English are vital, such as what FELLOW provide, as well as opportunities for a break from learning, to unmask and relax with your mother tongue.
Loneliness
I’ve mentioned in the previous points how leaving our home city as a student or tourist can be lonely (especially with cultural or language barriers), as well as how careers (such as teaching, academia, or medicine) can be consuming and leave little time for meaningful connection. I also discussed how the nature of renting means transience, and neighbourhoods regularly moving results in people being less likely to know others on their streets or identify as part of a local community. Oxford may be a busy place with landmarks, visitors, restaurant, and theatres; but community has gradually declined with groups such as social clubs or church membership being less a part of people’s identities. Alongside this, the cost of living crisis and having less disposable income to pay to be part of communities, further adds to the isolation of Oxford.
In 2018 30,000 pensions were living alone in Oxford. Living alone, and being a pensioner, carries risks of social isolation by having less routine due to retirement from work, and health issues which can further add to loneliness, isolation, and barriers to accessing services.
Loneliness can be stereotyped as being more endemic in elderly people, however it can affect all people and is more than just about being socially isolated (though social isolation and loneliness go hand in hand). Loneliness is rather a painful feeling of disconnection in response to social isolation of meaningful connection, and we can even experience it if we are in a bustling city like Oxford where there are many people, but that doesn’t mean we are meaningfully connected to them.
Perhaps surprisingly then, rather than retired people, in 2021, the ONS found that the people most at risk of loneliness were single people living alone aged 16 – 24; for example students leaving home to study in Oxford or young professionals living in bedsits.
Similarly, in 2020-2021 people who reported feeling lonely “Always/Often” or “Sometimes” were higher in Oxford than the national average (at 24% vs 22%). Compared to neighbouring counties, Oxfordshire had the highest rate of loneliness, and in Oxfordshire the highest rate was within the city at 29.43% – that’s almost a third of people feeling lonely in the city of Oxford.
Bear in mind that many of these statistics were taken during the pandemic, when much of education moved online and social activities ceased, but it paints a portrait of Oxford as a busy yet lonely city.
Loneliness is a serious health issue with the World Health Organisation likening its severity to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day and increasing risks of dementia & heart disease.
Loneliness isn’t a mental health condition, but social connection is a protective factor against deteriorating mental health, and towards building resilience. If we are socially isolated from meaningful connection, support, and friendships then enduring mental health conditions such as depression are likely. Furthermore, there is a stigma to loneliness, as though we are defective socially if we experience it – which can result in fewer people reaching out for support, and the associated impact on our self-esteem can in turn make it harder to socialise or maintain the social skills to do so.
Political Division such as LTNs
Oxford, being a historic city, has roads built originally for horse and cart, and many listed buildings so roads cannot be redesigned. The city’s road network isn’t made for the traffic of the ninth most visited city.
Secondly, many of the residents travel by bike for convenience and leisure, and parking is increasingly hard to find. In fact, the 2022 Active Lives Survey found 41.7% of Oxford residents cycled at least monthly, which is one of the highest in England.
Finally, the city is keen to reduce carbon emissions and traffic in local neighbourhoods.
In 2022, this led to a decision to implement Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) which involves closing off some of the smaller through-roads with bollards and filter traffic through larger roads. The idea was to reduce omissions, create fewer cars on the road as car travel became less convenient, encourage people to find alternate means of transport such as buses or bikes, and to reduce traffic in local neighbourhoods to create a sense of safety. Since the LTNs, 20 mile an hour limits have also been placed throughout the city and the use of Automatic Numberplate Recognition to limit who can use certain roads. More traffic filters are planned in the future such as limiting access to certain roundabouts such as St Clement’s.
The traffic filters have sparked much debate and disagreement for people on both sides, with demonstrations hitting the city both for and against LTNs. In 2022, we had just emerged from Covid lockdowns, and for some there was a sense of being controlled, gentrification, and our rights to travel being taken from us – bollards were uprooted from the ground with the council spending tens of thousands to fix them. Conversely, other citizens saw it as a resistance to their peace & privacy, or of sustainability – and stood in the place of bollards to reinforce the traffic measures.
As I write the script for this in early August 2024 there have likewise been protests on immigration across the country by far right groups, or anti-racism protests, with protests at Carfax, Bonn Square, and outside Asylum Welcome on Magdalen Road.
Debate has long been encouraged within the academics in Oxford, but political differences can also have impacts therapeutically on individuals and within communities. It can become a source of distrust, a barrier to community, an inciter of hate, and vilify people who can begin to feel unsafe in their own city for their political views or cultural heritage.
Farming
71% of Britain is agricultural lands, and that goes for 74% of Oxfordshire. Farming has some issues that make it a particularly difficult trade:
Workload
Farming is more of a lifestyle than just a job. You cannot go away at the weekend or take time off when your livestock needs regular tending to. Likewise, seasons can be particularly busy such as at harvest. Farmers will often work more hours than a doctor, and the work is difficult hard labour. In fact, 52% of farmers experience pain or discomfort and 25% have mobility issues. Finally, farmers these days are also balancing the intensity of the farming itself, with the administration from the management of a business and regulations they must follow.
Family
The previously described intensity of the work has presented difficulties in succession of farming businesses as the next generation leave. The intensity of the work can also make it difficult to rest, spend time with the family, or holiday. Farming is also a culture and community, often a trade inherited from parents.
Community & Mental health
Mental health and wellbeing are less spoken about within the farming community, with a culture of ploughing through difficulties, yet issues are incredibly prevalent.
RABI’s Big Farming survey found 36% of the farming community are likely depressed, 58% of women in farming experience anxiety, and 41% didn’t believe their business is viable over the next five years, creating a sense of hopelessness. Traditional mental health outreach like talking therapies also needs adapting, with farmers often struggling to make a fixed appointment each week or needing to cancel – for example if an animal is sick. Home visits & flexible working are ways of being more adaptable, rather than expecting agricultural workers to visit you or have a remote session when signal can be an issue.
Finances and business viability
Government grants have ceased or changed and often need a lot of regulations or admin to follow and receive, large corporations can buy goods in bulk but ask for a lower price per unit which can means less profits, climate change or particularly rough years where rains have flooded fields or stopped grazing; the cost of living affected infrastructure, machinery, and livestock; new regulations often need adaptions to comply, and Brexit’s affect on regulations and labour.
Oxford is a Beautiful City
I grew up in a small rural village within the Vale of the White Horse, in the South of Oxford. I moved to the city in 2006 to study at Oxford Brookes University. I’ve lived within the ring road ever since – now in Cowley where I work as a counsellor, and within the homelessness network in addiction.
One of the things that has kept me living in this county, and now city – as expensive as it is and through all the counselling issues that might affect its citizens, is how beautiful it is.
I love that I can walk a mile and be in the city with classic architecture, history, shops and sights, or local clubs and Meetup groups.
I also love that I can walk less than that mile and be in nature; punting on the Thames, seeing the foxes visit the garden, a leisurely run along the riverside to Sandford, getting lost in the beautiful woods at Shotover County Park, or a gentle walk through the many nature reserves like the Lye Valley.
I have painted the citizens of Oxford to be overwhelmed, burnt out, lonely, poor, and struggling with our mental health. These issues are all things that are likely to affect us and it’s important to be aware of. I also want to emphasise though that it is a beautiful city that I am proud to live in, and a city I have no intention of leaving.
Support
You may have read this article, or listened to the YouTube video and felt like some of these things really apply to you. Maybe you’re visiting the city as a student or tourist, maybe you work here – a teacher, within the NHS, or a farmer. You may be struggling to survive, crushed under the expense of the city; or maybe that thing on loneliness connected with you.
Whichever part connected with you, Counselling can help you draw on your inner resources to find solutions to the difficulties you find yourself in. I’d love to work with you, and offer counselling face to face in Cowley, or I can visit your home if you live within the ring road. I also offer remote or telephone counselling if you feel more comfortable with that.
I offer a free half-hour chat to see if I can be of help, and for you to get a sense of if I’m the right counsellor for you. My email is simonslistening.co.uk and my number 077 498 70502.
You can also read more about me, or other blog articles at www.simonslistening.co.uk or follow me on YouTube or Facebook at Simon’s Listening Counselling Services.
Simon is a Person-Centred Counsellor in Oxford working remotely and in person. He has lived in the county his whole life, and the city for almost 20 years. He appreciates the beauty of the city, nature, and connecting with people to help bring about meaningful change
