Keiran was nineteen when he had what he now describes, with a short laugh, as 'a very average terrible first year.' He had moved to Dunfermline for his HNC, was living in a flat with people he did not know, and was managing a low-level anxiety that he had never quite had a name for before. He did not fail anything. He did not drop out. From the outside, it looked fine.
'That's the thing,' he says. 'It looked fine. I looked fine. But I was spending a lot of evenings just sitting in my room not knowing what to do with myself. I didn't know what services existed. I didn't really know that what I was feeling was something other people dealt with too.'
He found out about Vibrant Health Advocates – Indigo the following year, when he spotted one of our pop-ups on his walk to a morning class. He stopped, spoke to a volunteer for about ten minutes, and picked up a leaflet about student mental health services in Fife. It was not a dramatic turning point, he is careful to say. But it was information he had not had before, delivered in a way that did not make him feel like a problem to be processed.
A few months later, he signed up to volunteer.
'I wanted to be the person I'd needed,' he says simply. He went through our volunteer training, which covers active listening, health information basics, and how to signpost without overwhelming someone with options. He has now staffed more pop-ups than he can count, in rain and in sunshine, between classes and after them.
What he values most, he says, is the informality of the format. 'Students will not go to a drop-in centre if it feels like a big deal. But they will stop at a table for thirty seconds. And sometimes thirty seconds is what they needed.'
He has had conversations he found genuinely difficult — students who were clearly struggling more than a leaflet could address, which meant carefully pointing them toward more substantial support. He has also had hundreds of lighter exchanges: someone wanting to know whether the NHS offers free counselling (it does), someone who just wanted to know they were not the only one finding the workload hard (they were not).
Keiran is now in his second year of a health and social care qualification and is thinking about a career in community health outreach. He credits the volunteering, at least in part, with helping him figure out what he actually wants to do.
'It sounds like a cliché,' he admits, 'but it's true. You show up to help other people and you end up helping yourself understand things too.'
Vibrant Health Advocates – Indigo is always looking for volunteers who want to make a difference in the Dunfermline student community. If Keiran's story sounds familiar — if you have been through something, or you simply care about student wellbeing — get in touch. We will train you, support you, and be out there on the pavement beside you.
