In the field of mental health, Brazil leads among the countries with the highest population rates of mental illness in the world (WHO, 2018), showing even more alarming results for the academic population (Vanessa et al., 2019). At the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), the covid-19 pandemic was a major warning of the institutional need for some type of action (Maia & Dias, 2020). There are several sectoral groups at UFPE that seek to “support” students with mental health problems, but it was only in 2021 that the mental health commission was created, responsible for producing an institutional consensus on the principles and strategies to be followed by university administrators, as well as the importance of integrate and systematize these actions with other public services. Throughout this article, I will present how university students from the global South deal with mental health problems, how these problems have their origin in the precariousness and neoliberalization of life (Brown, 2019), and how public universities persist amidst the multiple political and institutional crises of last decade. Based on ethnographic data collected between students and administrators, I intend to present the actions and strategies of these administrators to deal with the problems presented by students, how illnesses and disorders can be differentiated, how these students implement self-care practices in order to have some “control” over themselves (Pols, 2023), and how non-clinical care represent a degree of precariousness in the response capacity when demand is much greater than supply. It is in the midst of these questions that I seek to present how the academic environment is not just a physical space, but a continuum of politically established practices (Mol, 1999), having a serious impact on the mental health of future professionals of all areas.