Spanish University Students with psychic disability: accessibility and inclusiveness

Abstract

According to data from the second report "University and Disability" [1], 17.3% of the Spanish university students have some kind of psychic disability. This percentage decreases higher is the education, being the 6.2 % in doctoral studies.

The collective of university students with psychic disabilities is a very heterogeneous and complex group, since include many different situations of social diversity (intellectual disability, psychotic disorders, anxiety disorders or depression, etc.) Furthermore, the symptoms associated with this type of disability difficult university studies in many cases, although it does not have to necessarily assume academic failure. However, the ignorance of these issues may involve a stigma for these students, and may result in a silent or concealment of their situation to the rest of the university community. In addition, lecturers do not have the accurate knowledge to confront the daily academic and personal problems of these students.

In this paper, we study the current status of students with psychic disability in Spanish universities. We seek two objectives: 1/ establish a state of the art, and 2/ to analyse the information that Spanish Universities give about the attention to these students. To get these two goals, we collect the measures of promotion of inclusiveness used in higher education, and we suggest some possible improvements to help on the development of its academic activity.

We get two main conclusions: first, inclusiveness of students with psychic disabilities has a lack of support from the professorship, but not from the Disability Centers; second, there is no virtual assistance to students with psychic disabilities on the University websites.