During first year at university I would lie, unmoving, staring at the magnolia ceiling of my tiny student halls of residence for hours until my friend Alice came in and played Minnie Riperton’s Lovin’ You on the stereo, twice. At one point, my mother had to travel 200 miles to sleep on the blue brillo pad that carpeted my student bedroom just to walk me into the shower every morning. A few months into a degree that has shaped my life, I could be found wandering the muddy lawns outside my halls of residence, dressed in my grandfather’s thermal vest, pyjama trousers and slippers, squinting up at my ex-boyfriend’s window, fists balled against my stomach, weeping.

Somehow, amid the giant gingham laundry bag of single duvet, new pens, Argos cutlery kit and matching saucepans, I had been packed off for university utterly unprepared for this; unprepared for sadness. And yet, mental health problems soak through higher education like sambuca.

According to one National Union of Students survey, one in five students report experiencing some sort of mental health issue while studying, yet more than a quarter (26%) of those do not get treatment, and only one in 10 use counselling services provided by their university. Of course, that statistic may be skewed by the fact that the survey was self-selecting, but it is hard to deny that university is, in many ways, a petri dish of potential suffering.

You’ve left home, your friends are scattered across the country like Pumpkin cafes, you’re barely sleeping long enough to charge an iPhone, you’re anxious about fitting in, you’ve no one to eat lunch with, you’re probably going to break up with your first love, you can’t keep up with the reading, you’re skint, you’ve gone from full-time education to only seeing your tutor for an hour a week, you have no idea where the nearest Argos is, you’re stressed, you’re living with strangers, you’re drinking every night, you’re worried you’ve just spunked thousands of pounds up the wall to study a subject you don’t even really like, you’re living on potatoes and rolling tobacco, you miss your mum, you don’t understand the buses, your tutor can’t remember your name – and everyone keeps telling you that this is amazing fun. No wonder depression, anxiety, eating disorders and addiction are so rife.

Official figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency show that around one in 15 undergraduates failed to complete the first year of their degree in 2012. Right now, up and down the country, there will be students wandering the aisles of Costcutter, panic flapping in their chest like a footless pigeon, as they wonder if this is all worth it; if they should just go home.

Partly, of course, this is caused by the sheer cost of higher education. It’s hard for anyone, let alone a lovelorn insomniac 18-year-old, to truly believe that they are worth £26,000. It’s hard to know that you’re doing the right thing when you have less life experience to draw on than the average badger. It is extremely difficult not to worry about money when the next three years are going to cost you more than almost any other single action in your entire life. As the Mental Health Foundation puts it, there are “a larger proportion of students requiring support, alongside increasing debt, longer working hours and less support for students [due to] higher staff-student ratios and university staff work overload”. It’s a horror show out there; and we don’t even admit it.

But there is help, thank God. Many colleges and most universities have a confidential in-house counselling service, with professionally qualified counsellors and psychotherapists who you can see for free. I did. Twice. In fact, the BACP Universities and Colleges (a division of the British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy), has 615 individual members who are counsellors or psychotherapists, and around 95 colleges and universities have organisational membership. So they’re there; you might as well use them.

Also, as someone who grew up in a city where 24% of the adult population were students, I would argue fiercely for the importance of escaping the student bubble.

What helped me crawl out of my first year well of loneliness and depression (as well as Minnie Riperton and professional counselling) was meeting the plum-haired women behind the counter at The Pine Cafe in Leeds. It was becoming friends with the barmen at the Brudenell Social Club, chatting to the women who baked jam tarts at Murton Bakery and becoming so close to my local greengrocer Mr Riaz that he invited me to his daughter’s wedding in Karachi. It was learning from the local bus drivers how to get to the Yorkshire Dales for £6.18 return and which pubs sold the best crisps. It was talking to people from Leeds – people for whom student life was just another hum in an already throbbing city.

Being at university is about more than just being in lecture theatres. For 95% of students (according to the 2011 census) this is your chance to get to know a whole new city, new region, possibly your one chance to cross the north-south divide. This is your chance to meet the people who will inform the rest of your life. This is your chance to learn how to think, criticise, question, research. This is your chance to slide over from childhood into being an adult – and to decide just what sort of adult you’d like to be.

Of course it’s difficult; it may be cold, it may be lonely, you may feel heartbroken, you may get scurvy, you might fall out with your flatmates and fail your exams. But you are not alone – thousands of students have felt, are feeling and will feel exactly the same. First year is tough, sometimes very tough. And it takes a lot of strength to admit that.