We, the students, faculty, and staff of the University of California, San Diego believe that mental health is an integral part of students' success on campus. Students need to be ensured timely access to mental health resources on campus, especially in the case of an urgent need.

As it stands, the mental health services at the University of California, San Diego received a C+ rating in 2016 by the UC Student Association (UCSA), which rated CAPS on measures such as accessibility, diversity of staff, and number of counselling psychologists. While UCSD has taken big steps in improving such statistics, we are currently still 5 psychologists away from the minimum 1000:1 student to counselor ratio. Every time the student population grows by 1,000, there should automatically be funding for 1 more counselor.

While there are hotline services to ensure that students with urgent needs are taken care of, the average waiting time for a CAPS appointment is about 2-3 weeks currently. However, many of the counselors are overbooked at CAPS, so, this is an unsustainable wait time that will increase if more counselors are not hired.

We demand that there should be more funding and spaces allocated to CAPS to better the student to counselor ratio, as well as to have a student affairs case manager for each of the six undergraduate colleges. With a diverse population at UC San Diego, we should also factor in the historically underrepresented groups that need more specialized attention at CAPS. There is a dire need to hire two culturally proficient and multilingual psychologists at UC San Diego, and we hope to be able to push for not just more funding but spaces allocated to CAPS.

We, the community of UC San Diego, demand that there should be more funding for mental health. We hope that the UCSD administration will hereby consider increasing the budget/funding for mental health and CAPS on the UCSD campus.