How the University of the Western Cape Layers a Chatbot Into Its Mental Health Support Ecosystem

Institutional Profile

The University of the Western Cape (UWC) is a public research institution in Bellville, a suburb of Cape Town, South Africa. Founded in 1959 as a university for people then classified by the apartheid government as “coloured,” UWC is today home to a diverse student body of more than 25,000 students. UWC comprises seven academic divisions, referred to as faculties (Arts and Humanities, Community and Health Sciences, Dentistry, Economic and Management Sciences, Education, Law, and Natural Sciences), and draws students from provinces all over South Africa as well as internationally. Although the main language used in instruction and administration is English, UWC also uses Afrikaans and isiXhosa for communications and student support.

The Challenge/Opportunity

The transition from home to college can be stressful for students anywhere, and some additional facets are in play at institutions in South Africa. For example, for many of the 5,000–6,000 new learners that UWC welcomes every year, seeking counseling or therapy resources carries a significant stigma. “We have students who, culturally, do not believe in mental health,” said Nathan Kayser, a coordinator with the UWC Centre for Student Support Services (CSSS). “If you seek mental health support, you are deemed crazy. In many cases, it can be perceived as witchcraft or the colonizers’ language. Some older people in cultures that don’t believe in mental health issues might tell you this is a white person’s thing: We’re Black. We don’t get crazy—we survive.”

Meanwhile, those students might be dealing with significant challenges adapting to college. Many come from rural villages and are new to city life, and many are new to using digital learning. Quite a few have limited funds. For some, their first language may not be one of the most common languages used on campus—English, Afrikaans, and isiXhosa—adding to the challenge of forming new relationships. “The transition itself becomes a crisis and challenging period within the life of a student,” said Kayser. “Because they don’t connect with each other easily, we find students that become depressed in their first year.”

Matete Madiba, deputy vice-chancellor of Student Development and Support at UWC, said another factor that creates a need for mental health services is that college is often where students first grapple with gender-based violence they might have experienced or witnessed. Madiba recalled that during protests against gender-based violence in 2016 “one young man…broke down completely, and we had to find a way of supporting him. It was taking him back to when he was growing up and how abusive his father was to his mother. This was sending him into a new level of trauma. We had a lot of these types of cases.”

As at many institutions, the COVID-19 pandemic amplified the isolation many students were experiencing and created more demand for mental health resources. Laetitia Permall, director of the CSSS, said, “The waiting lists were long, and we found ourselves in a major dilemma. We were encouraging students to come for support, but when they came, we were not able to respond to their needs.”

These pressures led UWC to develop the Integrated Student Mental Health and Wellness policy in 2021, which expanded services in several ways. First, it enabled the CSSS to expand its staff to five full-time and three part-time counselors; the CSSS also added a traditional healer (an indigenous health practitioner who offers culturally embedded spiritual and holistic care) who is also a social worker. Second, the CSSS uses a Faculty-Psychology Model to appoint, train, and supervise mental health practitioners to provide mental health care within each faculty. Additionally, the university partners with the South African Depression and Anxiety Group to provide a 24-hour counseling care line.

Even with these changes, the university does not have enough professionals to see everyone requesting support. Moreover, simply adding counselors does nothing to reach the large number of students who don’t request support in the first place, whether because of stigma, routine scheduling conflicts, or not seeing their anxieties as warranting counseling. Put another way, the university did not have enough resources to meet the explicit demand, and staff at the CSSS knew a large unspoken need existed even beyond what they could see.

The Solution

In recent years, many colleges and universities have looked to mobile phone apps to provide mental health support to students and employees. An automated chat interface that advises students has the potential to ease the shortage of counselors and also reach students who are reluctant to contact a counseling center in person.

Before Madiba came to UWC, she had experience selecting and implementing an app for this purpose as the director of student affairs at the University of Pretoria. In that role, Madiba had worked with a vendor to make all of the university’s mental health information resources accessible online. However, she and her team also wanted the site to respond directly to students’ needs, and “that’s when the idea of using a chatbot came about,” she said.

Madiba was impressed by research showing that cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) could be provided effectively by a chatbot. One possibility in that vein would have been for the University of Pretoria to work with a software developer to customize a chatbot, but that is an expensive solution. Instead, Madiba began researching off-the-shelf options. She eventually identified Wysa, an AI-based chatbot that uses the techniques of CBT to help users manage stress and anxiety. Users interact with it like other generative AI chat tools, and the app responds with techniques to help them improve how they feel. Wysa is available 24 hours a day and can be used anonymously. Rather than creating an account with identifying information such as an email address, students scan a QR code or click a link given to them by the university, and from there they can use a pseudonym for their sessions. Their conversations on the app cannot be connected to their personal information.

As a result of her experience at the University of Pretoria, Madiba had already done the research when she arrived at UWC in 2023. “So I came here with a proposal,” she noted, “and I said we need to do this.” Madiba’s colleagues at UWC were in part persuaded by the fact that Wysa “was developed by psychologists in India, where the cultural context is similar,” said Permall. “It also uses a therapeutic modality that has a long history and proven efficacy.”

UWC introduced the app to students and staff in September 2023, and since then it has been adopted by more than 5,000 students and 450 employees. UWC marketed the service to students and staff as a “confidential companion” rather than a virtual therapist. Students are encouraged to use the app as a sounding board or even as a place to journal about difficult feelings. Students don’t only use the app for major crises, Kayser said. They chat with it about everyday challenges, such as relationship issues, family conflicts, and problems they might hesitate to discuss with a mentor or counselor, such as sexual issues.

Turning to a mobile phone app to solve a problem is familiar for many students, so in many ways, a chatbot for mental health is a comfortable first step for undergraduates. As Kayser noted, “Students don’t always knock on doors anymore. If we are not going to meet students where they are, we’re going to lose them. The reality is that we do not have enough therapists to see to all the students. If we are counting only on our counselors to see to all the issues and challenges our students are presenting, we will always fail.”

In a 2025 article, Kayser and Madiba, along with their co-author Faeza Khan, wrote about how the app is not a replacement for counseling but integrates with a comprehensive approach to mental health services:

“Through its escalation protocols, cases flagged as high risk are referred to institutional counsellors or external crisis services, ensuring human oversight. Student Support Services staff have been trained to guide students in using Wysa and integrate it as a supplementary referral resource, particularly for students hesitant to engage in formal therapy. Operating alongside peer support programs, campus-based clinical services, and community referral pathways, Wysa forms part of a layered care framework that addresses resource constraints, lowers barriers to early help-seeking, and promotes student well-being within the broader institutional ecosystem.”^Footnote1

Permall said that for some students, the app is a way of getting comfortable with the idea of therapy or an extension of the safe space they experience there. A therapist might assign homework within the app to reinforce what a student learns in therapy, such as tracking cognitive distortions or activities to shift their thinking. This can be especially useful for UWC students who are away from home for the first time. “I find that in the absence of a support system, Wysa becomes a holding space between sessions,” said Permall. “It becomes the container for the work [they’re doing in therapy].”

Outcomes/Lessons Learned

The 2025 article quoted above resulted from Madiba’s insistence on having a research and scholarship component in the initiative. “Because we are not just implementing it carelessly, we want to see if indeed it will help us with mental health literacy so that we can be wiser when it comes to using Wysa to support our mental health,” she said. The analysis conducted for the article found that the average user had 7.1 sessions with the app and that the average session was 25.86 minutes. More users engaged with the chatbot during exam periods and, according to surveys, found it useful during those times. Researchers found that undergraduates, particularly first-year students who are adjusting to university life, are more likely to use the app than others. They also found that women were more likely to use the chatbot; about 70% of Wysa users at UWC are female, a discrepancy that surprised Madiba. “We have to work harder to say to our male students,” she said. “It is not a weakness to seek help, especially the kind of help that can prepare you to avoid trouble, rather than to wait until you are in trouble. We are trying to share that message and encourage them.”

The waitlist for therapy at the UWC CSSS is longer than it was before, but Permall calls this “a happy problem” because the app has generally raised awareness among students about mental health. In addition to the app, the therapeutic team has explored group therapy as a modality to meet students’ changing needs. “I find that Wysa has become the conduit because not all students know what therapy is,” she said. “Engagement with the app becomes a therapeutic space that mirrors what happens in counseling. It breaks down the stigma, and it becomes the stepping stone for them to actually come to us, saying ‘I need help.’”

Kayser echoes that this is a positive development. “What we found now is that students use the chatbot first, then go to therapy,” he said. “One of the students told me that through the chatbot they’ve learned the words to use around their mental health.” That illustrates how a therapy app is not simply a supplement to direct services but can enable innovation by extending the counseling center’s expertise further into the student body. “An institution has to think very smartly about how to reach people who need the care but cannot access it or don’t want to access it,” Kayser said. “I think AI and chatbots and technology really arrived at the right time.”

Note

1. Faeza Khan, Naythan Kayser, and Matete Madiba,“Enhancing Student Well-Being and Success Through AI-Driven Mental-Health Support: A Case Study of AI Mental-Health Chatbot Implementation at a South African University,” Journal of Student Affairs in Africa 13, no. 2 (2025): 125–140.Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.↩

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A.J. O’Connell is a Writer at McGuire Editorial & Consulting.