University students globally are experiencing worsening mental health outcomes, with anxiety, depression, and emerging climate-related psychological conditions—eco-anxiety, climate grief, and ecological dissociation—forming a growing clinical concern. The University of Lagos (UNILAG), located within a highly climate-vulnerable urban environment in sub-Saharan Africa, serves approximately 60,000 students exposed to escalating flooding, urban heat stress, and sea-level rise. This study examines the adequacy of climate-responsive mental health support services for this population. The study synthesises four theoretical frameworks: Clayton’s (2020) model of climate anxiety psychopathology; Lazarus and Folkman’s (1984) transactional stress and coping theory, adapted to Nigerian university contexts by Okafor and Nweke (2019); Antonovsky’s (1979, 1987) salutogenic sense of coherence framework; and Ulrich’s (1984, 1993) psychophysiological stress recovery theory. These frameworks are used to critically assess UNILAG’s counselling services, eco-therapy initiatives, psychoeducational group interventions, and campus-based environmental engagement programmes. UNILAG’s Student Counselling and Health Services Division provides individual counselling primarily targeting generalised anxiety and depression, typically assessed using standardised tools such as the GAD-7, PHQ-9, and Beck Depression Inventory. However, climate-related psychological distress remains both diagnostically under-theorised and institutionally under-addressed. While eco-therapy and nature-based interventions demonstrate clear psychophysiological benefits for stress reduction, their implementation within campus mental health services remains fragmented and non-systematised. Similarly, peer-led psychoeducational programmes addressing climate anxiety and grief show potential for fostering shared meaning-making and psychological agency, but lack formal evaluation and institutional integration. The intersection of academic pressure, financial strain, digital social fragmentation, and direct environmental exposure produces a compounded transactional stress burden that conventional counselling models do not adequately capture or address. Mental health services should incorporate climate-specific screening tools and intervention protocols that distinguish adaptive from maladaptive climate anxiety responses. Eco-therapy should be institutionalised as a core clinical intervention rather than an optional wellness activity, leveraging Lagos’s lagoon and green ecosystems. Peer-based climate grief support groups should be formalised and subjected to longitudinal evaluation. In addition, campus environmental stewardship programmes should be designed to simultaneously promote ecological engagement and psychological restoration of agency. Funding structures must prioritise climate-responsive mental health infrastructure alongside existing counselling provisions. UNILAG students experience a concentrated climate–mental health burden shaped by Lagos’s acute environmental vulnerability. Addressing this requires a shift from predominantly pathogenic models of mental health care toward a salutogenic framework that enhances comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness as core dimensions of resilience. Without such a shift, university mental health services risk remaining misaligned with the lived realities of climate-distressed student populations in Nigeria.
Chioma Okwuchi Mboho (Wed,) studied this question.
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